Maya is inscrutable

 

Some (perhaps really silly) reflections at 4AM in the morning...

Does God have free will? If so, how come he never choses evil? Is he never tempted to do so? But if so, how is his will “free”? Doesn´t a free will imply an actual possibility of a choice between at least two options? But who could tempt god, if he is alone and perfect?

Perhaps God is free in the “compatibilist” sense. In other words, he doesn´t have free will “internally”, being all-loving and ever-loving by his very nature, but he has free will “externally” in the sense that nothing outside of Him compels Him to act as He does.

But this too leads to problems. For instance, where does free will even come from, if the Creator and Ground of Being lacks it? If God created or emanated creatures with a free will, how did they get this “free will”? This has led some mystics to propose that the ground of free will exists in God´s very nature or essence, this essence being somehow “dual”, having both a constructive side and a destructive ditto. Or this ground being somehow a void from which anything can rise. Or even that God´s primary attribute is precisely his radical freedom, his ability to do whatever he chooses. There is also the idea of “self-limitation”, but that sounds self-contradictory, for how can a perfect god limit himself? Where does God´s power of self-limitation even come from? His nature must be very strange indeed!

Or is free will actually an imperfection? After all, the “freedom” to chose between good and evil (or freedom to in effect *create* evil by turning away from God) certainly looks imperfect! But where does this imperfection come from? If God created/emanated everything, does it come from God himself? Or is everything God creates/emanates necessarily less perfect than God himself? But isn´t even that a form of imperfection? A perfect god would only expand Himself as He already is. Also, if every creation of the Divine is *somehow* less perfect than God, doesn´t this imply that *there are no guarantees against a fall*? Somewhere, somehow, there will always be suffering. But what kind of shitty universe is that, in which not even the Creator-Emanator can stop his creations from attacking each other? Indeed, isn´t the Devil really the strongest party in such a universe, since there will always be room for him somewhere? At the moment, he seems to be reigning in a universe 93 billion light-years wide!

One “solution” to be above is to meekly say that we don´t know, but we need faith in Jesus, who was resurrected, und so weiter. But surely there is an error in reasoning here: we seem to be perfectly able to *ask the questions*, so how come we can´t find any answer? Maybe it´s because we don´t want to hear the obvious answer: there is no god and hence no “mystery” to be solved in the first place. Perhaps the atheists are right. Or some kind of very orthodox Buddhists. Our hallowed ideas about Perfection might simply be abstractions (as in “the perfect triangle” or the mathematical certainty of 1 + 1 = 2) or empirically-derived fantasies writ large (Charlie´s chocolate factory turns into the New Jerusalem).

Another solution is to redefine our ideals of perfection. Perhaps the cosmos we live in (God, warts and all) really is the best possible? After all, we can return to Him when we´re ready for it, right? How is that not perfect? Still another solution is the one given by Osho in one of his books: “There are no answers to the questions about the meaning of life. But if you start to meditate, all those questions will just disappear.” Go figure! Somehow, all these “solutions” to our intellectual predicament sound kind of overlapping…