Veni Quid Veniat

     God is perfectly sovereign, and man's will is free. At the risk of dangerously abbreviating a fascinating discussion, I'd like to prove both phrases in that sentence, and, more important, provide a commentary on why they are anything but contradictory.

     The first is easy. The Bible makes it perfectly clear that God is sovereign over all things. In Psalm 103:19 we are told that "the Lord has established His throne in the heavens; And His sovereignty rules over all." Again in Isaiah 46:10, "remember the former things of old; for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose,'" Yet again, Psalms 103:19, 115:3, and 135:6, among many other verses, speak to God's sovereignty. The final piece is Ephesians 1:11, which tells us that God "works all things after the counsel of His will." We are left in no doubt that God is indeed sovereign. In addition, we are told that we are created in the image of God. We are not given his power, so the implication is that we are given the ability to be free moral agents, responsible for our own action - that man has free will.

     How is it possible to reconcile the competing facts that man's will is free and that God is sovereign? The answer, I think, lies in properly understanding the nature of God. Too often, we approach God as if He were simply a human like us with a particular ability - for example, when we think of God's omnipotence we think of a human who can do anything, or when we think of His omniscience, we think of a human who knows everything. To a certain extent, this is inevitable. We will naturally compare an unknown to what we know. Generally speaking, this is an effective aid to our understanding, but it isn't perfect. When we start probing too hard into the nature of God - His sovereignty, for example - this approximation will always be imperfect. To correctly understand the coexistence of God's sovereignty and man's free will, we need to look closer at who God is.

     If any human were to be sovereign in the way God is, he would completely preempt free will. Humans can create systems over which they have a certain limited sovereignty, but only if certain conditions are met. The system must be deterministic (that is, for any given situation, given a unique input, there will be a unique output) closed (that is, free from outside influences), and it must be understood completely. Assuming a system meets all three of those requirements, a human could theoretically uniquely determine all events in the system by determining the starting conditions (making the system deterministic and closed allows the starting conditions to determine the course of events, and understanding the system completely allows the starting conditions to be manipulated to produce a given event). Unfortunately for "fortune-tellers" everywhere, the real world is nothing at all like this. At a very general level the purely physical world can be thought of as a deterministic system, but in actuality it is probabilistic. Even worse, humans aren't just probabilistic, they are free agents, and are not bound by external circumstances except in the most general sense. For this reason, if a human were sovereign, free will could not exist, and if free will exists, no human can be truly sovereign. This, in my opinion, is the source of much of the apparent conflict between free will and sovereignty.

     This is only true if a human were sovereign - the solution to the contradiction lies in how God differs from us. For us, the contradiction exists because the world is not deterministic. We cannot possibly know exactly what the output will be for every input, and so we have no way of knowing how to manipulate the starting conditions to produce a desired event, even if we had the ability. What if we were omniscient, though? If so, we would know exactly what would happen in any given set of circumstances, which is simply another way of saying that for any given input, we would know the output - not because the system was limited to one output for that input, but because of our hypothetical omniscience. One could argue about whether this means that the universe is actually deterministic to an omniscient being or whether the universe is merely similar to a deterministic system, but that's not particularly important at the moment: what matters is that the universe is perfectly predictable for an omniscient being, and thus can be determined through setting the starting conditions.

     We can go farther than that, though. Not only is it possible for an omniscient being to determine an unrestricted system by setting the starting conditions, since God is omniscient, He knew precisely what effect any variance in the starting conditions would have. Because of this fact, we can conclude that God decided what every event would be - had He wanted something else, He could have changed the starting conditions to produce a different outcome. Every molecule in the universe acts according to His plan.

     As an aside, it should not be assumed from this discussion that God only acts by setting the starting conditions. Certainly, that is the way He usually chooses to work His will, but he can also intervene supernaturally if He chooses to. For the purposes of this discussion, since God is the only source of external input, the fact that setting the starting conditions requires that He be sovereign implies that He is sovereign. The fundamental point is that an omniscient creator God logically must be sovereign.

     We've essentially arrived at the conclusion that those who argue for God's sovereignty support, but remember how we got there: we assumed free will in a probabilistic universe. We didn't arrive at God's sovereignty by limiting man in any way - God is still sovereign, but our will is free, at least to the extent that our nature and God's power (recall Pharaoh, whose heart God hardened) allows. This should not be taken as a license to lethargy or wrongdoing. Because our wills are free, we are still responsible for our actions. God doesn't preempt your will, rather, He uses it to work His ends. Both God's sovereignty and man's free will are important elements of the Christian worldview, and - far from being contradictory - they are perfectly compatible as long as we recognize who God is.