What was the likely reason for God to give man his free will, making it possible for Eve to conspire against Him with the Serpent and to seduce Adam into an act of disobedience? We are aware of a multitude of such reasons, the validity of all of which we need to weigh against the end result of allowing evil into the world. We can debate, of course, whether any kind of reason provides a sufficient justification for the appearance of evil in the world, but there is no arguing against God’s creative design. Ironically, here is also a compelling case for political philosophy to defend the principle of free societies, with their terrible excesses, in opposition to the totalitarian principle, which promotes obedience and suppression of free will, in exchange for peace and pleasantness of a restored Garden of Eden. (Could God, please, abolish free will altogether, in order to make the beautiful totalitarian dream of the Paradise a reality, rather than wishful thinking?!)
But one of the best arguments for free will, although highly irreverent and unmistakably tongue in cheek, is provided by Nietzsche. In his Genealogy of Morals, 2nd Essay (7), he writes about “the pleasures of cruelty” and Homer’s gory depictions of wars as “festival plays for the gods."
"It was in the same way that the moral philosophers of Greece saw it. Their invention of “free will,” man’s absolute spontaneity in good and in evil was devised to furnish a right to the idea that the interest of the gods in man could never be exhausted. There must never be any lack of novelty: the course of a completely deterministic world would have been predictable for the gods, and they would have quickly grown weary of it.”
This is an absolutely delightful, aesthetically perfect, irreverently innocent, and brutally, childishly honest, apologia for the invention of free will, thus providing its highly imaginative rationalization of the theistic involvement of an interested God, as opposed to the deistic indifference of a bored God, in human affairs. In this passage, Nietzsche rises to the absolute mystery of Creation. Where I embrace his contemplation with particular delight is in his philosophical concern for the rationality of Creation. A purely deterministic world (and that is what the world would have been without the spontaneity-in-time of free will) would have made God’s Creation of Time totally superfluous, unnecessary, unimportant. The only rational justification for the conception and the reality of Time is exactly this precious spontaneity of free will, a festival for God! Yes, our Creator can still see our lives-in-time as one still image, from His all-encompassing vantage point of the timeless eternity, but this vantage point never becomes a point of disadvantage for exactly the same reason: not because we may be able to somehow drag God into Time with us, but because our spontaneity makes us interesting!
But one of the best arguments for free will, although highly irreverent and unmistakably tongue in cheek, is provided by Nietzsche. In his Genealogy of Morals, 2nd Essay (7), he writes about “the pleasures of cruelty” and Homer’s gory depictions of wars as “festival plays for the gods."
"It was in the same way that the moral philosophers of Greece saw it. Their invention of “free will,” man’s absolute spontaneity in good and in evil was devised to furnish a right to the idea that the interest of the gods in man could never be exhausted. There must never be any lack of novelty: the course of a completely deterministic world would have been predictable for the gods, and they would have quickly grown weary of it.”
This is an absolutely delightful, aesthetically perfect, irreverently innocent, and brutally, childishly honest, apologia for the invention of free will, thus providing its highly imaginative rationalization of the theistic involvement of an interested God, as opposed to the deistic indifference of a bored God, in human affairs. In this passage, Nietzsche rises to the absolute mystery of Creation. Where I embrace his contemplation with particular delight is in his philosophical concern for the rationality of Creation. A purely deterministic world (and that is what the world would have been without the spontaneity-in-time of free will) would have made God’s Creation of Time totally superfluous, unnecessary, unimportant. The only rational justification for the conception and the reality of Time is exactly this precious spontaneity of free will, a festival for God! Yes, our Creator can still see our lives-in-time as one still image, from His all-encompassing vantage point of the timeless eternity, but this vantage point never becomes a point of disadvantage for exactly the same reason: not because we may be able to somehow drag God into Time with us, but because our spontaneity makes us interesting!
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