As a thought experiment, I was always fond of Pascal’s wager. To put it simply, French philosopher Blaise Pascal proposed that being a Christian and following the rules of Christianity not only was a good bet if God exists, but there was little to any downside in living a Christian life.
As with any thought experiment, your mileage may vary. Distilling the essence of God’s plan is what’s important to me. When you get down to it, there are rules, but there is also forgiveness. To have forgiveness, you must have free will.
Stephen Hawking has stated that God may be the sum total of all the laws of the universe. If I may digress into scifi fandom for a moment, J. Michael Straczynski of Babylon 5, while not religious, used the term “the universe” in such a way that God could have been used interchangeably.
Lack of specific faith has been a byproduct of this creeping form of determinism. If God doesn’t actually do anything, why bother thinking about Him? This brings to mind another Frenchman, Charles Baudelaire. He quoted “the devil’s best trick is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist!”
Christianity and certain other religions have a method to deal with people who fall short. People struggle because the struggle itself has value. The Founding Fathers of this country were good Christian men (if not always good Christians). They believed that we are endowed by the Creator with the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These rights belong to us and cannot be separated from us. They can be taken away, but they always belong to us.
Even if you believe that God is the order of the universe, there is still the possibility of evil. Evil is what seeks to defy the laws of the universe and of man. Taking away our individual liberty in the service of the collective makes us less than human. Instead of being a pawn of a deterministic universe, a person can become a slave of a fundamentally flawed oligarchy.
When I think of faith, this example comes to mind. Let’s say that God decides to directly intervene in the lives of everyone on Earth. He starts by making it impossible for anyone to commit a crime. Let’s say the punishment is swift, painful and universal. Criminality would drop precipitously. Still, would the criminal mind be affected? Do people stop committing crimes because they want to or because they are always caught? What happens if God moves on to other behaviors that are undesirable? We would have a population that lives in fear. Eventually the fear would give way to oppression and desperation.
When J. Michael Straczynski created the epitome of evil on Babylon 5, he created a race that traded power for loyalty, used people as the main computers of their ships and implanted biological minders into their allies. The “good” guys weren’t much better, but they only genetically enhanced people and blew up planets outright.
The worst countries in the world rule by a lifetime oligarchy. They control the means of production. They have minders all around. The seek the pacification of the collective. It’s peace at a very high cost. It seems that the countries with freedom are growing tired of the messiness and disorder of freedom. The freedom to do the wrong thing is considered worse than being forced into doing the “right” thing. The question is, why bother doing anything if you have no choice in the matter?
