Why is there divine soverreignty and human freedom

Question

Discuss the relationship, as seen in the patriarchal narratives, between divine sovereignty and human freedom. For God to be sovereign, to what extent and why did God have to cause things to happen and to what extent and why is man free without taking away from God's sovereignty?

Answer 1

God is Sovereign. He is all powerful, all knowing, all present. He can do whatever He wants, when He wants. And there is no way that we as finite humans could ever take anything from God.

Freewill is something that God has given to mankind. God wants us to love Him and serve Him. But not by force, only out of true love. Because love cannot be forced or manufactured. True love has to be given—it can’t be taken. Think of it this way. If you had a puppy, you want that puppy to love and obey you. You can teach the puppy to obey, but you can’t force their love. That puppy will choose to love you or hate you and there is nothing you can do about it. You may say, “but if God is all powerful, couldn’t he just force our love?” And that is a good question. Think back to our illustration with the puppy. If instead of having a puppy, you were to get a state of the art robotic puppy, it could be programmed to “love” you. And it would automatically obey you. But would it be true love? Absolutely not! It would be programming. God did not program us to Love Him. He gave us the choice to love or hate Him. To Serve or Disobey Him. The purpose being that true love can only come from a free choice.

Answer 2

Dear Richard,

I can't address this from the standpoint of the requested resource, but some questions you'll have to wrestle with in formulating your own stance might include:

1) What do we need to be able to do to say that we "understand" something? Different relationships are apparent at different scales -- subatomic / atomic / nano / macro (ordinary) / galactic / cosmic -- and although we think that we (occasionally) know a lot about some of these, history (as well as science) informs us that our knowledge is incomplete to various extents (even, for example, what most of the universe is made of!).

2) With (1) in mind, what definition can we assign to "cause → effect"? Why should we assume that because we can or cannot be sure of a cause → effect condition, that some less or more complex entity similarly can or can't?

3) What is the relationship between our sensory systems (and associated neural circuitry, including thought), measurement, and knowledge?

If you study human behavior, you too may be amused by people using technology for other means than it was designed -- recently, I saw a negative air ion generator (a perfectly well-developed technology for particle removal from interior air spaces, and also indirectly an immune system stimulator) touted as potentially useful for attraction of paranormal beasties -- some confusion between ectoplasm and plasmas, perhaps? Anyway, the connection with your present question, is that we frequently do use technology to sample a further range of information, and search for unusual phenomena to study to extend our comprehension of the universe. But that is a consequence of perception being ordinarily limited in physical and temporal domains.

Just a few thoughts to pique your further inquiries,

Cheers, -- S.