Atheism and Free Will

Christians have often wrestled with questions of unanswered prayer. Most Christians have had at least one prayer that was never answered or have witnessed the illnesses or deaths of people that they believed to be devout Christians in rightstanding with God. How can the concept of a loving God who longs to help His children be reconciled with unanswered prayer? Gregory A. Boyd's book Is God To Blame? Moving Beyond Pat Answers to the Problem of Evil purports to provide answers to that burning question. Boyd's book explains God's will from the perspective of open theism, which asserts that "insofar as God gives freedom to agents, the future is composed of possibilities that are known by God as such," a view that "conflicts with the traditional view that God is eternally certain of all that will come to pass, including the decisions of free agents" (202). In other words, much of the future is "open" for God in the sense that He does not yet know what it holds (Ware 18).

Open theism has implications for the theological ideas of free will and prayer, as well as how one approaches the issue of pain and suffering. While Boyd addresses some of these issues with impressive discernment, his perspective toward others is problematic, as it reveals the image of a God he views as limited. In this respect, a book by Bruce A. Ware-God's Lesser Glory: The Diminished God of Open Theism-provides an excellent foil to Boyd's book and a basis for comp

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meticulous divine blueprint." In the blueprint worldview, everything that happens has a reason, and God either causes or condones every action and event (Boyd 41). Boyd (125) describes this view thus: Because God cannot override man's free will, "he can't ensure that his will is carried out in every situation. He must tolerate and wisely work around the irrevocable freedom of human and spirit agents." Boyd does not agree with the blueprint worldview, and this says much for his powers of independent thinking, as this view has been promulgated endlessly in Christian circles for years. Christians often accept as God's will anything that occurs, regardless of how terrible or opposed it may be to God's stated will. Rape, murder, incest, and tragedy all fall within the purvey of the old saw, "There's a reason for everything," and hackneyed expressions bandied about at Christian funerals, such as, "God needed him in heaven" and "It's all for the best" demonstrate how little scriptural basis there is for most people's religious thinking. Although Boyd still clings to open theism, he departs from the classical Christianity that puts God at fault for tragedy and points out a number of reasons that could be behind the fai

Category: Philosophy - A