Arrival and The Free-Will Defense

While I am no film critic, in my opinion, the 2016 film Arrival was brilliant. The story line was fascinating, it was nominated for an Academy Award for Cinematography, and it won the Award for Best Sound Editing. If you have not seen the movie yet you need to stop reading this and go watch the movie, because there will be spoilers!

This past weekend at church I was teaching the first part of an apologetics class on the Problem of Evil. The aim of the first class was to demonstrate how difficult the Problem of Evil is especially when we consider the doctrine of God's providence. (Here are two posts which outline the challenges regarding providence: Part 1 and Part 2).

In the next class we will look to interact with some of the defenses which Christians have put forward for handling the Problem of Evil. Perhaps the most common defense put forward is that of the Free-Will Defense. C. S. Lewis argued for this approach by stating that if someone is free to be good then they are free to be bad. While God knew what would happen "He thought it worth the risk" to make humans in such a way that they are capable of evil. Hence, in this view all evil is attributed to the free will of creatures who brought evil into the world through their free choices.

There are numerous questions one could and should raise at this point. First, if it is true that free will as defined by Lewis and others necessitates the ability to do both good and evil, wouldn't this mean that in heaven our free will would be removed from us since we will no longer be able to sin? In other words, God created Adam and Eve with a capacity which would then need to be removed for people who spend eternity in the New Heaven and New Earth. 

If God's relationship with us in eternity is going to be just as robust and genuine without the ability to sin, wouldn't that mean God could have created Adam and Eve with those same attributes to begin with? Doing so would mean that there never would have been a need for all the sin and suffering and evil in the world. I would be very interested in hearing a response to this line of inquiry, but I am not holding my breath for a cogent counter for this conundrum.

Second, and even more troubling, is how the free-will defense seems to require a limiting of God in one way or another, and this is where Arrival becomes so helpful. In the movie, linguist Louise Banks finally receives the gift of the heptapods' language and in so doing she is able to experience time without the linear bonds of humanity. This enables her to look into the future and to see the events which are to come so as to make decisions in the here and now.

The most startling decision is her willingness to have her daughter even though she knows with certainly that it will end in the child's death as a teenager. She fully realizes the pain which will come from the death of the child but she chose to experience that pain anyway in order to experience the many joys of the relationship with her daughter to be. Notice, she is not able to change the future but she is able to make decisions based on knowledge of the future.

The free-will defense when pressed to its logical limits boils down to a similar situation. While many of the proponents of the view fully defend God's omnipotence and independence, the view functionally makes God subservient to a future reality which he is bound to actualize. For example, God's desire for creatures with a free will, as defined above, causes him to be constrained into only creating a certain kind of universe. One of the philosophical two-steps performed to dance around this issue is known as middle knowledge.

One of the most well know advocates of middle knowledge is Dr. William Lane Craig who demonstrated the limitation it puts on God in a blog post back in 2011. To be sure, Dr. Craig is a brilliant philosopher and a Christian brother who longs to honor the Lord with his life and ministry. I do not make these comments to belittle him at all but to call out what I perceive to be a deep inconsistency in his theology. In the blog post Craig seems to unwittingly have written a potent confession of his willingness to limit God's power, "The counterfactuals of creaturely freedom which confront Him are outside His control. He has to play with the hand He has been dealt."

Let me translate, Craig is declaring that there are things which are "outside" of God's "control" and so God must play "the hand He has been dealt." Dr. Craig is not merely two-stepping here, he is tangoing all over the doctrine of God and in particular God's omnipotence and independence. In Craig's view, God's power is limited by things external to him and hence God is dependent on something external to him. 

Craig's middle knowledge is a complex and highly philosophized version of Louise from Arrival. Of course, on Craig's view God is able to see the infinite number of future possibilities out there, but at the end of the day God is servant to the card dealer. Like Louise, God decides that this world with all the suffering and evil is something he is willing to put up with but he is not the all-powerful God of the Bible. Rather, he is a God whose potency only extends as far as his ability to play the cards he has been dealt.

For all the do-si-doing and turning his interlocutor round and round with philosophical language, Craig and other advocates of the free-will defense are actually using their anthropology to determine their theology. Rather than start with the doctrine of God they have begun with the doctrine of man, and with a particular definition of free will. Then they work backwards in order to determine what God can be like.This approach is wrongheaded, we must begin with our doctrine of God and work down from there. We must begin with the all-knowing, all-powerful God who is not at the mercy of a cosmic card shark. 

Finally, we need to be wary of is how the free-will defense minimizes, if not obliterates entirely, God's purpose for evil. In the free-will defense evil is merely allowed by God as an entailment of having creatures with libertarian free wills. The proverbial sage will not allow this:

The Lord has made everything for its purpose,
even the wicked for the day of trouble. (Proverbs 16:4)

While there certainly are great difficulties which surround the problem of evil we must not demote God to the level of Louise. God did not merely know that would happen, he designed the universe with a specific purpose which was brought about through the evil actions of men. What possible purpose could there be for evil? Paul responds: 

Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory— even us whom he has called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles? (Romans 9:21-24)

God's purpose for evil includes showing his wrath and putting his glory on display. Moreover, God's purpose for evil was what the sage called - "the day of trouble," because the day of trouble par excellence was the day of the crucifixion. The day God bled and died for his people. The day specifically planned before creation and all of human history was orchestrated to ensure its realization. At least that is what the Apostles Peter and John seemed to think:

...truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place. (Acts 4:27-28)

In fact, it is the message regarding this "day of trouble" which Paul said was the very "power of God for salvation to everyone who believes" (Romans 1:16). There is no question that the Problem of Evil has many difficulties, but we dare not add to them by minimizing God and his purposes for creating this world - warts and all.