Questions About G-d 6: If God Is All-Powerful, Can We Have Free Will?

I made a short series of videos considering questions about G-d that I have noticed get asked from time to time. Below is a rewriting based on the script for one of the videos, followed by the video itself.

If G-d is all-powerful, can we have free will? Short answer: Yes.

The first thing is to clarify that I’m not just talking about free will (FW) in the compatibilist sense of the word used by people who try to reconcile FW with determinism. Compatibilists are people who think that we are free if we can do what we want to do, but maybe we also are determined because we can't avoid wanting what we want.

I’m talking about what’s called libertarian FW: the idea that we have the ability to do or not do things.

The next thing to clarify is that omnipotence, or G-d being all-powerful, does not mean G-d can violate the rules of logic—for example, by giving people FW but also giving them no choices at all.

A lot of contemporary philosophers tend to recognize this as a reasonable limitation on omnipotence, or, better yet, as something omnipotence doesn’t actually mean--it doesn't mean G-d can break the rules of logic.

The classical answer—the thing you’re more likely to find in medieval philosophers like Anselm or Thomas Aquinas—is that being able to violate the rules of logic would not be a strength, but a weakness. So of course G-d, who is all-powerful/omnipotent, can’t do it!

So--G-d's omnipotence does not mean G-d has some ability to violate the rules of logic. That does not mean that G-d's omnipotence is compatible with FW. It just means that omnipotence would either have to remove FW entirely, or not at all. There’s no halfway house where G-d gives us FW and still forces all our decisions.

But does omnipotence mean we have no FW?

The problem seems to be that we have some apparent conflict between G-d's sovereignty and human free will. The idea is that G-d can’t have unlimited power without overruling free will—that our free will, if we have any, would put some limits on G-d's power.

But, frankly, there simply is no problem here.

There never was.

The illusion of a problem may come from the idea that FW places limits on G-d's power. Now, in a sense, that idea is true: If I am really making a particular decision with FW, then G-d cannot be forcing that decision.

But look at the alternative theory. Just suppose . . .

. . . that G-d's infinite power really does destroy freedom.

You know what that means?

That means that G-d does not have the power to create us with FW!

So either G-d lacks the ability to create beings with FW, or else G-d has that ability but lacks the ability to control some decisions we make freely.

So which ability does it make more sense to say that G-d lacks?

On the one hand, there’s the ability to force every single decision.

On the other hand, there’s the ability to create people with FW.

We could stop there. We could just say that the ability to create people with FW is way better than the ability to force every single decision.

We could say that that is an ability worthy of G-d.

That’s fine. I agree.

But I think we can go a little deeper.

Why is the ability to create people with FW better? Because people like that are worth creating. It’s a better universe if G-d made it to include people with FW.

That means people with moral responsibility, and people who can cultivate creation in G-d's name . . .

. . . with creativity.

In other words, it means G-d's ability to make what the Bible, and all the Abrahamic religions, say we human beings are: the image of G-d!

But what about that other ability—the ability to control every decision? That’s an ability to . . .

. . . well, it’s an ability to . . . destroy FW!

But if FW is a good thing, then this isn’t much of an ability, is it?

If you wanna think like contemporary philosophers, I suggest you go ahead and do so. You could say, for example, that the ability to destroy FW is the ability to do a kind of harm, and that the inability to do harm is a reasonable limitation on the idea of G-d's omnipotence.

But if you want to think in a way that is a little bit wiser, try thinking like Anselm and Aquinas: The ability to destroy FW is the ability to do a kind of harm, and that makes that particular ability a weakness, not a strength.

That is why we can have FW even if G-d is all-powerful.

That is why we can have FW . . . because God is all-powerful.