All:
Interested to know if the idea works, if it flows and makes sense…
Bobx3
On God’s refusal to accept the actions of "robots"
When explaining why God must allow the prospects of ECT (Eternal Conscious Torment aka ‘hell’) or alternatively of annihilation, those who hold to these things as realities claim that God does this because He cannot accept the “love of a robot”. That is, by definition, a robot cannot love because it is not free. So, according to this notion, if the love rendered has been programmed into that person, it is meaningless, not valid, and therefore not acceptable to God. That’s the general reasoning.
Who, after all, would be impressed, or moved, by a love which was simply programmed into the one that supposedly has this love? It would seem to us that such a love would be the love of a machine; a robot. You might say you love me, but if you had no other choice but to love me because you had been programmed to do so, that love would not move me, but would be rather meaningless.
But if this is true – and the argument certainly has merit – then it should be equally true of the rebellion of a robot. That is, if rejection of love (lets just call that sin) is not free, or has been programmed, or determined, God cannot, and will not, accept it either. And for the very same reasons He does not accept the love of a robot. If robot love is meaningless, then so too is robot rebellion.
Setting that aside for the moment, the problem of how we can possibly detect whether love or rebellion is in fact determined, we must ask what it means to say that love is determined. To suggest that love is determined must mean that love is caused by an outside agency. However, if that is true, then it should be that genuine love must be caused by ourselves - must come from within us - if it is to be considered acceptable to God.
But how could that be – and is that idea compatible with the witness of scripture? Are we, in fact, capable of loving freely, of ourselves, apart from God?
Christians believe that we have been created by God; created in the “image of God”. It seems reasonable to suggest, for the moment, that to be created in the image of God means to be created with both the capacity to love and the awareness of what love actually is. This would mean that when we love, we are simply doing what we were originally created with the capacity to do. Programmed to do if you will. Further, should it be that this force we call “love” actually created us and sustains us in some poorly understood way, to act counter to that force would be tantamount to suicide. It would also be irrational given that it acts against it’s own self interest.
Given that we were created by love - an outflow of the love shared within the Trinity, that we are programmed with the capacity to discern love and to respond by loving in return, and that our very existence depends on this love, it seems rather wrong to suggest that our love is of our own making. For when we love, we are simply functioning as we were created to do; reflecting back the love of God by which we were created in the first place.
Thus, to suggest that love, to be legitimate, cannot be caused by an outside agency (God in this case) is to suggest the very same mindset of self controlled autonomy that tempted Eve to go her own way – apart from God. In effect then, Eve embraced the belief that life, and love, could in fact come from within her; self created and apart from God. But this sort of autonomy is an illusion; being a narcissistic denial of the realities that both created and sustain us.
It is a tragic irony to imagine then that “freedom” is measured by how far we may stray from our original design. A fine, well bred race horse is only free to be what it was created to be when all that slows and hobbles it are removed. So too with us; created in the image of God to love, to worship Him alone, and to do so in the company of all the rest of God’s creation. A creature designed to love, yet departing from the way of love by rebellion and hate and avarice and self absorption, thus demonstrates not freedom, but delusion, weakness, and departure from intended design.
God, having both created us then redeemed us, surely knows well enough if the love we return to Him is free, or programed in ways He finds unacceptable. When He comes upon a rebel who acts counter to the love this person was originally designed with, His diagnosis is, almost certainly not an abundance of “freedom”, but rather it’s absence.
But the forces which may have caused this unloving being’s actions, namely illusions and false perceptions, are every bit as deterministic as anything God might be accused of planting in His creation. As such they are surely not in the service of freedom. They are in fact the enemies of freedom and, God not only has the right but, as defender of freedom, the obligation, to aggressively dispel and remove all such obstacles to true freedom.
Those who cry “freedom”, in defense of ECT hell, or of annihilation, are in fact correct to plead freedom, but very wrong in championing what true freedom actually is not. Because of Christ, and His faithful witness even unto death, we are no longer “free” to live illusions that deny Him. For God also acts in a freedom of His own. And He will never “chose” to allow forever the illusion’s which bind those who rebel. So He comes to free them; to release them to what He created them to be. Lovers; free and full. Anything else is bondage and is thus incompatible with God’s will and counter to freedom.
Thanks for sharing