Free To Be You and Me

I watched a recording of Stephen King's Desperation yesterday and one of the sub-plots dealt with the existence of God and free will. Now, let me be the first to say, that nobody should get their theology from science fiction and horror writers (with apologies to Tom Cruise and all the Ron-ettes). I mean we don't go to the Presbyterians for di-lithium crystals, do we?

But there does seem to be a common theme in our pop culture to blame God for everything that goes wrong. In this case an evil earth-demon named TAK was killing everyone in an old mining town and a couple of characters were ragging on God for letting bad things happen. They also had a discussion about whether God allows man to have free will, even though the TAK monster was the only one taking over anyone's free will.

So, once again, I thought I'd throw a cold bucket of logic onto the discussion.

As to the existence of God. He either does - or He doesn't.

If He does exist, then there follows a huge discussion about who He is, what He wants, and how all that is accomplished.

If He doesn't exist, then all of the non-believers should quit obsessing over Him. It has always struck me as odd, the fervor with which non-believers fight against God. If they truly believed they were right, it wouldn't matter what the other side said or thought. It's like (from their point of view) they don't know how to win an argument.

As to free will. God either controls our actions - or He does not.

If He does control our free will, He is doing a lousy job of it. Otherwise how do you explain all the atheists?

If He does not control our free will, then mankind is doing stuff on it's own. So how can they complain about God letting bad things happen? Should He only control the free will of the bad guys. And to what degree? If He only kept bad people from doing bad things, that would eventually include all of us at some time or another. And then we would not have free will.

To sum things up:

• If God does not exist - mankind definitely has free will. So quit blaming God.
• If God does exist and we don't have free will - we wouldn't be able to complain about Him.
• If God does exist and we do have free will - it is the BAD people doing the BAD stuff. So quit blaming God.
  

In fact, the only person I can recall, recently, to definitely not have free will is Katie Holmes. A compelling argument for not getting your theology from science fiction writers.