Now imagine the balance point between having a plan for someone and them having free will, and consider the phrase “God the father”

This is part of what broke my beliefs. It gets crazier than this even.

Let’s put aside free will and just say it’s God’s will. Oh this flood happened, it must have been God’s will! I ask, to what end?

The average Christian will reply “something good will come of this, you’ll see, we just can’t see it yet”.

Okay, let’s pause there. God is infinite and all powerful, correct? So, that means, in true infinity and all power, no matter what he is doing with his Devine plan, there are infinite alternative ways he could have achieved it. That’s infinity. If there aren’t, then he’s not infinite. If he can’t do some of those infinite ways, then he is not all powerful.

If he can do any of those infinite ways, then he chose this one, the one that destroyed homes and lives, he chose it out of infinite other options that wouldn’t have destroyed people. There exist infinite other paths, he chose the destructive one.

So God is either not all powerful, and he’s just a guy trying his best, which hey, good trying and I understand, but not “God” then. Or he’s sadistic and chooses this.

That is the one that broke my faith.

The theological answer is that God doesn’t really have a step by step plan for the life of each person. Sure, there are ways he wants to bless you, and things he wants you to do that he’s put you in a position to do, but not a step by step plan. Example: Esther was in a position to have the king’s ear when he planned to kill all the Jews. Esther 4 says that the Jews will be saved with or without Esther helping, but God had chosen her and given her what she needed to save the Jews.

Also, on free will, the most important part of free will is the ability to choose to leave God. That’s what the tree of knowledge of good and evil is about. It’s not knowledge in our modern sense, a better description would be “the right to define good and evil”. So when Adam and Eve ate that fruit, they were basically saying “I don’t want God’s idea of what good and evil is, I want to do it myself”. I know that seems not so bad to our culture, but it’s basically saying “I know better than God, who knows everything”.

It gets better. “God’s Plan” and free will are incompatible, yes. But also, Christians love to pray for stuff. “Make mama get better”, “Let the Cowboys win”, “Get me the job I want”, etc. And they LOVE to say that “prayer works”. But at no point do they consider the implications of that notion, that praying for things changes the outcomes of the world.

A) Anything, prayer or otherwise, that can change the trajectory of events is, like free will, wholly incompatible with the notion that the universe is following in lockstep with “God’s Plan”.

B) If absolutely anything would be part of God’s Plan, according the Christian faith, it would be the birth and death of every human. This is directly incompatible with prayer saving someone’s life.

C) Changing the outcome of any choice a person is going to make (such as hiring decisions), is also wholly incompatible with free will.

D) The very notion of prayer causing change places human agency over God’s will. Yes, presumably, God could choose whether for not to grant a prayer. However, if he changes his prescribed outcomes based on your prayer, then that means either that he decided your idea was better (which seems odd for an all-knowing being) or decided to capitulate to you for some reason. Either way, you hold sway over your almighty god’s will for the universe. This thought is SUUUPER narcissistic to believe in.

E) Other people’s prayer holds sway over you. If your prayer can cause God to change the minds of others, then their prayers can likewise cause God to change your mind in turn. Neither of you then has free will. Moreover, it is not just God, ultimately, that can negate your free will, but any other Christian that prays for it. That’s troubling, to say the least.

F) Bad things, things unjustified by karmic justice, things unrelated to human free will, happen all the time. Things like natural disasters, disease, animal attacks, genetic accidents, etc. Those things happen to good people, Godly people, innocents, infants, the unborn. People pray for these things not to happen. “God, Protect them”, “Bless them with your Grace”, “Watch over them”. Yet they still happen. If prayers works, unless God decides to not answer them, then God must have decided to ignore those prayers. Prayer working is, itself, incompatible with the idea that there is a holy plan that must be followed, so that is not a justification for choosing to ignore those prayers and allow such things to happen. That means God could have stopped it and did not. God is directly responsible for these evils. There is no way around that.

On that happy note, enjoy your Sunday service guys!