Last week when we were home teaching at the Wilkinson’s, Anne was telling us that Larry King said he was an agnostic and his reason was, “How can anyone believe in a god that would allow something like 9/11 to happen’” How can God allow such horrible things that happen in the world? If there is a god, why doesn’t he stop the pain and suffering of his children?
I like C.S. Lewis’s explanation:
“Why is God landing in this enemy occupied world in disguise and starting a sort of secret society to undermine the devil? Why is he not landing in force, invading it? Is it that he is not strong enough?
Well, He is going to land in force; we do not know when. But we can guess why He is delaying. He wants to give us a chance of joining His side freely.
God will invade. But I wonder whether people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realize what it will be like when He does. When that happens, it is the end of the world. When the author walks onto the stage the play is over. God is going to invade all right; but what is the good of saying you are in His side then, when you see the whole natural universe melting away like a dream and something else—something it never entered your head to conceive—comes crashing in; something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left?
For this time it will be God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature. It will be too late then to choose your side. There is no use saying you choose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up. That will not be the time for choosing; it will be the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realized it before or not. Now, today, this moment is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last forever. We must take it or leave it.
“If a thing is free to do good, it is also free to be bad. Free will is what makes evil possible. Why then, did God give us free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata—of creatures that worked like machines—would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for his higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that, they must be free.
Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way; apparently He thought it worth the risk. Perhaps we feel inclined to disagree with Him. But there is a difficulty about disagreeing with God. He is the source from which all your reasoning power comes; you could not be right and He wrong any more than a stream can rise higher than its own source. When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all; it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on. If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free-will—that is, for making a live world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings—then we may take it, it is worth paying.
So, I agree with C.S. Lewis’s argument for agency and I feel that each of us at each moment is progressing to one state or the other.
