Who knew that the thorny question of free will would become a campaign issue?
According to Richard Mourdock, Republican candidate for the Senate from Indiana and crazy person (I know, I’m being redundant), if a woman is raped and gets pregnant, “It is something that God intended to happen”. Now that statement can really only be read one way: that god not only intended that the woman become pregnant, but that his instrument should be the rapist.
Now, that implies, if I’m not mistaken, that the rapist had no choice but to rape, just as the woman had no choice but to get pregnant (and that’s a “no choice” the Republicans want very desperately to preserve). And that implies that the rapist lacked free will. It wasn’t his idea to rape that woman, God made him do it. Hmmm, perhaps an Indiana rape defendant should try that argument out.
Now, when I was back there in Catholic school, I recall one nun valiantly trying to explain to us incredulous second or fourth graders (not third, I had a lay teacher that year) how God could be omnipotent and omniscient, know the future before it happens, and still not be responsible for what we did. Looking back, I feel for her. It doesn’t take a genius to see the problem with having to believe all those things at once (we grade schooler saw the problem), but it takes a theologian with years of training to make it seem to make sense. She wasn’t up to the task, but in retrospect, I don’t think she did too bad a job. She analogized it to a mother watching a home movie of her child falling off a bicycle. She knew the child was going to fall, didn’t want it to fall, but couldn’t prevent it. The argument, I guess, is that for God, there is only the eternal now. He observes all at once, knows all at once, but does not cause any particular choice to be made, though presumably he could take charge if he wished. Of course, I could be wrong about all this and it’s all bullshit anyway, but I believe I’m definitely correct about the basic argument Mourdock is making. If the rapist’s act is not his own, then none of our acts are our own. Each and every breath we take is only what God intends. Which undercuts all religion entirely, of course.
So, a word to the Republicans, there’s something else that follows from what is clearly a core belief of yours. You didn’t build that. We didn’t build that. There are no Galtian overlords who achieved success through their own atheistic efforts. God did it, and you can’t take any credit. We are all but pawns, being pushed around by an omniscient, omnipotent, but nonetheless quite petty and cruel God. Or does God, Zeis like, only spend his time randomly impregnating unoffending women by raping them by proxy, so to speak? Free will, with exceptions?
I just want to make it clear that I wrote the above before I read this, in which the points I’ve made are made more profoundly, but less tongue in cheekily.