Genesis 2:15-17 (KJV)
And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

When I was very young, my sister Ladonna and I were in our family’s old van, a 1980-something Ford Club Wagon, sitting in a driveway while my mom had run in to the house for a few minutes. To this day it puzzles me, but before my mom went in, she specifically instructed Ladonna not to let me get to the front of the van. Now I am fairly certain that I was two years old at the time – three at the most – so I suppose it’s possible that I already had a history of mischief behind the wheel, but one wouldn’t think so. Oh yeah, and it is worth noting that the vehicle was running and that the brake pedal did not need to be depressed to shift from park. To shorten the story, everyone involved was uninjured, but the garage door needed to be replaced. It is also worth noting that this was not our house. Yet I don’t think that anyone necessarily acted irresponsibly. If you disagree, then I would like to also hear your interpretation of God’s role in the fall of man.

If today we were all granted the gift of free will for the first time, I’m sure the response would be fairly positive. “Great,” we’d all say. “This is much better than the vibration of one-dimensional strings in n spacetime dimensions deciding what is best to come out of my mouth next.” But what would be any different? It is probably true that if we suddenly lost our free will, we probably wouldn’t even know how to tell the difference. So why does it matter?

Free will is important because of accountability. Without it, there would be no such things as sin, morality, or righteousness, and respect, love, and kindness would be mere illusions.

I don’t believe that the key to the original gift of free will was that humans could make relatively trivial life choices such as whether to learn a trade or get a college degree. Important as those decisions are, the fall of man is clearly a much broader issue. To understand what free will really means, one must understand that infinity cannot be found in nature; in other words, everything we know has limits. The examples are endless but obvious. One way in which free will has changed over time is that those limits have increased in number since the days of the garden. Adam and Eve had the free will to decide whether or not to live an eternal life in paradise without knowing sin. That was the original gift of free will, and we no longer have that option.

Thinking back to that incident in the van so many years ago, I imagine that I wasn’t even aware that there was something wrong that I could do until my mom mentioned it. That probably put the thought into my head, though she didn’t mean for that to happen. This causes me to speculate that, if He had wanted to, God could have done more to prevent the fall from happening without violating free will. I’m sure he could have kept the serpent out of the garden. He could have hidden the tree far away or made it a hundred feet tall. Whether or not we are talking about an actual tree is irrelevant. By telling Adam and Eve not to eat of the tree, he was not only warning them, but also giving them a choice; the ball was in their court. And like we all continue to do, they failed.

The responsibility that comes with such a gift is overwhelming. Just thinking about the scope of it makes me timid. If one simple act of irresponsibility can turn human and spiritual history upside-down, then what sort of catastrophe might I induce? Would I sacrifice the gift of freedom to ensure that the blame for such disappointment and regret never falls on my shoulders?

On that note, I hope that the right decision has been made to create this public eyehole into my mind. We often don’t act rationally even though we try to. With that in mind, instead of pointing out that I have fallen into the vortex of a social phenomenon with a high risk of pretentiousness, I would ask you all to ignore that this collection of articles will be hosted by a service called "Blogger."

Thank you for reading, and enjoy.

Labels: Brainstorm

Posted by Farewell, Free Will on Monday, December 04, 2006 at 6:18 p.m. | Permalink