In a recent comment here on Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life, a reader called sran4275 posted two videos by American intellectual Robert Lawrence Kuhn titled “Is God Totally Free?” and “How Free is God?” The videos feature interviews with various thinkers on the issue of God’s freedom. They are heady and fascinating if you’re into that sort of thing. Each video is a little over 25 minutes long. Here they are, if you would like to watch them:
Sran4275 wanted to know what I thought of the videos. You can see the original comment here, and read my original reply here. This post is an edited version of my reply.
Short version: I think the discussion of God’s freedom in the interviews is missing some key elements of God’s nature, and of the nature of freedom. If we truly consider God’s eternity, omniscience, and omnipotence, and take it seriously that God is the source of everything that exists, a different picture emerges about God’s freedom.
God and freedom
First, freedom is not one of the characteristics traditionally attributed to God. Omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, and so on. But freedom as we commonly think of it, meaning freedom of choice, is not one of the classical characteristics of God.
In the videos, Kuhn focuses on freedom of choice as the very definition of freedom. This is the sort of freedom he believes God must have if God is to be considered free.
As humans living in the material world, our primary freedom is the freedom to choose between good and evil. This obviously is not a characteristic of God. Unlike us, God is 100% good, and 0% evil. Choosing evil is not something God could or would do. God is good. Choosing not to be good would be choosing not to be God. This would be the ultimate unfreedom. It would be choosing to have limited power instead of all power because ultimately, despite earthly appearances to the contrary, evil is powerless compared to good.
The key freedom that we humans have here on earth as an essential part of our humanity simply doesn’t apply to God.
Does this mean that God is unfree? No. It means that freedom of choice is not an issue for God. God doesn’t need it, because God is the originator of everything, and God is good.
We humans need freedom of choice so that we will not just extensions of God. To have a real, mutual relationship with God, we must be able to choose whether we want to be in relationship with God in the first place. In other words, we must have a will of our own. And since everything good is God, the only way we can have a will distinct from God is if we can choose something other than good.
That choice, inevitably, is evil. If good were the only possibility, we’d be right back to square one. Remember, everything good is God, and God is everything good. Every choice we could make would involve being in relationship with God. It would just boil down to what exact type of relationship we wanted with God.
It would be like the classic parenting trick of saying to a young child, “Do you want to wear your blue pajamas or your red pajamas to bed?” when what the child really wants is not to go to bed at all. The child doesn’t have a choice about going to bed. But the parent is making it look like there’s a choice by giving the child a cosmetic choice.
If we could choose only what kind of heaven we wanted, and not whether we wanted to be in heaven in the first place, the relationship with God would not chosen, and therefore not free, and therefore programmed rather than real.
That’s why God put the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the garden of Eden. Without it, we would not be free, we would not be human, and we would not have any distinct existence of our own. We would be mere extensions of God.
The tree of knowledge of good and evil is not intrinsically evil. It was only eating from the tree that was forbidden. If Eve and Adam had not eaten from it, it could have remained in the garden as a good and beautiful tree because it represents our ability to choose something other than God, so that our choice for God is free, and our relationship with God is real. But once Adam and Eve made that choice and ate from it, evil entered into human life. This is a necessary byproduct of the freedom of choice God gives us as an essential part of our humanity, and of our existence as distinct beings.
What is freedom?
Second, freedom of choice is not the only kind of freedom that exists. There is also the freedom to do what we want to do—which, if anything, is an even greater freedom than freedom of choice.
As I said earlier, in the interviews, Kuhn focuses on freedom of choice. And freedom of choice certainly is a baseline for us to be human in the face of God’s omnipotence. But would it even mean anything if, once we made a choice, we were unable to act upon the choice we made?
A free country is not just a country where you can choose to be a doctor or a lawyer or a mechanic or an athlete, and nobody else can make that choice for you. Even more than that, it is a country where, once you’ve made a choice about what you want to do, you are free to go ahead and do it—presuming that your choice is constructive and not criminal. Would our freedom of choice mean anything if we could choose to be a doctor and go all the way through medical school, but once we graduated with all the training and credentials, we were not allowed to practice medicine?
The greater freedom, then, is the freedom to live as we want to live. This is the freedom to express what we love in our life. And this is the kind of freedom that God has. God can do what God wants to do. God can do what God loves to do. And that is the ultimate kind of freedom.
It is also the kind of freedom we humans have forever in heaven (and in a more limited form even in hell) after we have made our choice of what sort of person we want to be during our lifetime on earth. I do think that in heaven we have freedom to choose between one or another good course of action. But these are largely cosmetic choices. We no longer have the freedom to choose between good and evil, which is the ultimate form of freedom of choice. What we have instead is the freedom to live the way we have chosen to live, with no external constraints and no fear that we will ever lose the life that we have chosen and that we love.
God, meanwhile, is already living the life God loves. And God is free to do everything God wants to do.
This is not a simple freedom, but a complex one, because it involves taking into account the freely made choices of other beings (us), and not violating those choices by, for example, taking people who have chosen hell and turning them into angels instead. God doesn’t want to do that because it would mean destroying them as human beings by taking away both their freedom of choice and their freedom to live as they have chosen. Once God allowed evil to exist as a necessary possibility for us to be human, there is no longer any possibility of a simplistic God—if that was ever a possibility in the first place.
God is outside time and space
Third, God is not in time and space. God only acts into time and space.
Pervading the interviews is a sense that God exists within the arrow of time, so that God acts and reacts within time, learns new things along the way, and so on. The idea of God being outside of time is briefly raised, and just as quickly dropped.
And yet, we now know that time and space are properties of the material universe. This is something Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) said two and a half centuries ago, long before it was confirmed by twentieth century physics. And since God exists outside of the material universe, time and space do not apply to God. All the talk about God changing, learning, and growing betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of God. It requires God’s consciousness to exist within the arrow of time, which it doesn’t. God does indeed see all things everywhere in all time, including what to us is the future, from a state of eternal present.
It’s not that God “can’t” change. It’s that the very idea of change doesn’t apply to God, just as the very idea of freedom to choose between good and evil doesn’t apply to God. Since God is eternally present within all time and space from outside of time and space, change has no meaning when applied to God.
This is very hard for us humans, who exist within the arrow of time, to comprehend. It would seem to us that this must mean God is static and frozen. But that’s not how it is for God. God is the very opposite of static. God is infinite activity and power. However, God does not act temporally and spatially. Rather, God acts from within outward, from the center to the outside, into all times and spaces simultaneously.
God is law and morality
Fourth, God is not constrained by something outside of God such as moral goodness. God is moral goodness. God is not constrained by logic. God is logic. God is not constrained by physical law. Physical law is an expression of divine law, which is God. God is the source of physical law. Physical law is simply the way God gets things done in the physical universe. Saying that this is a constraint on God is like saying that the pen is a constraint on the writer. No. The pen is the instrument that the writer uses to write.
God does operate according to law. But this is not a constraint on God. It is simultaneously God’s own nature and the tool God uses do what God wants to do. Without law, nothing can get done at all, because everything is chaotic. Law provides channels by which God can accomplish what God wants to accomplish, which is primarily creating a heaven from humanity. All the laws of the created universe, both spiritual and material, are the means God uses to accomplish that purpose.
The core attributes of God are love and wisdom. Love is the motivating force. Wisdom is the structure or law by which love acts. The result is effective power, or action, which is getting things done. None of these are “constraints” on God. They are how God gets things done.
God makes all “choices” simultaneously
Fifth, freedom of choice doesn’t apply to God because this assumes that God is limited to choosing between doing this thing or doing that thing among possible things that could be done. But the reality is that God simultaneously does all things that can be done. God doesn’t choose between A and B. God does both A and B.
This, too, is complex, not simple, because God is acting into realms that, unlike God, are finite, not infinite. This means some things just can’t be done, because they would require an infinite Creation, which is not possible. The very thing that makes Creation distinct from God is that it is finite, not infinite. That’s why I said that God doesn’t choose among possible things that can be done, but does all things that are possible. God does not have to choose one option from among options A, B, C, D, E, and F. God checks the box labeled, “All of the above.”
God’s freedom
Even though God acts into finite realms, offering limited choices, God does not require infinite choices because, once again, God’s freedom is not freedom of choice. Rather, God’s freedom is the freedom to do what God wants to do. And what God wants to do is to create a heaven from humanity—meaning a vast community of people who have freely chosen to love God and the neighbor mutually, and who are expressing that choice in action in their daily lives. It is a life of loving relationship with God and with one another.
Creating this heaven is what God wants to do.
Creating this heaven is what God is doing.
And that is the true meaning of God’s freedom.
Here is a shortened video version of this article:
For further reading:
- Which Tree is in the Middle of Your Garden?
- If God Already Knows What We’re Going to Do, How Can We Have Free Will?
- Does God Grow and Develop? What about Open Theism?
- Does God Change?
- God: Puppetmaster or Manager of the Universe?
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Lee Woofenden is an ordained minister, writer, editor, translator, and teacher. He enjoys taking spiritual insights from the Bible and the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and putting them into plain English as guides for everyday life.
Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life 
So from the perspective of God, there is just one eternal moment (that somehow does not end), in which He made all His choices all at once, which is why that verse in Malachi says He does not change?
Hi K,
This is still thinking of it in terms of time. And it’s very hard for us not to think in terms of time.
But thinking of it as one eternal moment that “somehow does not end” is thinking that it would have the possibility of ending, which would mean that it is spread out in time, which it is not.
And saying that God “made his choices all at once” is thinking that this happened at some time in the past, so that now it has already happened.
That’s not how it works. God is truly outside of time altogether.
We use temporal words in reference to God because, especially during our lifetime on earth we can barely, if at all, lift our minds out of time. So we think God “did” something or God “will do” something. Although these make sense from our temporal perspective, when God is acting into the universe where time and space exist, that’s not how it is from the perspective of God’s consciousness. For God, everything is an eternal present, in which all things everywhere and in all time are simultaneously present. God simply acts. Only when God’s actions enter into time and space does anything temporal or spatial apply to them.
Hi, Lee
Well, i was late to it again but excellent article. I have yet to read it properly but i did watch the Video.
Also, the major issue with problem, after some research i found was could God have done otherwise, could he have created our world differently. Which is actually quite discussed topic in theology. As it induce a paradox.
And some defense, seems to argue that God could have done otherwise in that he was absolutely Capable of doing anything(un bounded) but at the same he didn’t choose from alternatives, but he simply made the absolute decision.
Hi Saran,
Thanks. Glad you enjoyed it. The video does bring up a few points not in the article, but the article is where I cover the question in more depth and breadth. And even the article only establishes a few basic principles for thinking about these things.
Yes, this is a greatly debated issue. However, as in Kuhn’s videos, the debates are generally engaged based on faulty concepts of God and creation, and therefore tend to end in paradoxes rather than answers.
The first faulty concept is the idea that God exists and acts within the arrow of time. This is a fallacy based on our own time-bound nature, experience, and mind during our time on this earth in our physical body. The reality is that God exists outside of time and space, and acts into time and space from a position outside of them.
Even using tenses in reference to God’s decisions and actions (“God did X,” “God will do Y”) is what Swedenborg calls an “appearance of truth.” It seems to us a if God made a decision in the past and acted upon it, or will make a decision in the future and act upon it, but that’s only the appearance, not the reality. The reality is that God acts timelessly and spacelessly from an eternal present and from a state of being that is present everywhere at once, both spatially and temporally, in relation to created things that are in space and time.
This means that discussions of how God “could have done” this, but instead “did that” are based on an appearance and an illusion. It is the appearance and illusion that God exists within time, and acts sequentially, choosing among various options as they present themselves, and then making further choices based on the unfolding results of those choices.
That’s not how it works at all. God acts simultaneously into all time and space from a position outside of time and space. From God’s perspective God is now creating Adam and Eve (metaphorically speaking), God is now giving the Ten Commandments, God is now coming to earth as Jesus, God is now executing the Last Judgment on the corrupted Christian Church, and God is now (metaphorically) sending the New Jerusalem down to earth after the corrupt Christian Church and its institutions have finally been thrown into the (metaphorical) lake of fire. For God, these things don’t happen one after another, even though they do for us. For God, these are all present realities into which God is acting.
I am aware that for us, this is not really conceivable, so it seems like it couldn’t be possible. But even though it goes beyond our actual, practical grasp, intellectually we can understand that this is how it is and must be for God. And once we understand this, most of the paradoxes that we get entangled in by thinking of God as time-bound melt away.
The second faulty concept is that God created the universe out of nothing.
This is false. God did not create the universe out of nothing. God created the universe out of God’s own substance and form, distinguishing it from God by putting limits around it, and in this way making Creation finite rather than infinite, and thus non-God rather than God. So Creation is not God, but Creation comes from God.
In Genesis 1, this is expressed metaphorically in the statement that God made humans in God’s own image and likeness. The “likeness” is the substance, and the “image” is the form. God’s substance is love, and God’s form is wisdom. These are expressed in all created things via correspondence.
The fallacy that God created the universe ex nihilo, out of nothing, leads to further paradoxes. It makes creation an arbitrary thing that God could whimsically decide to do this way or that way among various alternatives, not directed (or constrained, in faulty human terms) by anything at all. There was a blank canvas, and God could paint this or that or any old thing onto it that God felt like painting.
But that’s not how it works at all. God didn’t create the universe from nothing, but from God’s own self. And the laws of the universe were not something God just arbitrarily decided to impose upon the created universe. They are an expression of God’s own self, and specifically, of the wisdom element of God, which in the Gospel of John is called the logos or the Word. Spiritual and natural law are direct expressions of divine law, which is God, or specifically, is God’s wisdom.
This is why, as covered in the above article but not in the video, all the debates about whether God was “constrained” or “had to” make certain choices are misguided, and based on fallacy. God is not “constrained” by law or logic. God is law and logic. To abide by law and logic is to abide by God’s own nature. These are the means God uses to achieve God’s ends, which are the substance (or love) behind everything God does.
This is why I say in the article that freedom of choice doesn’t apply to God. It’s not so much that God doesn’t have freedom of choice as that freedom of choice is utterly irrelevant to God. God does everything God wants to do, without any constraint. God doesn’t have to make choices between two or more alternatives because God does all things in accordance with the laws of order, which are part of the nature of God. Acting contrary to the laws of order would be acting contrary to God’s own nature, which would be tearing things down rather than building them up.
Everything that is good, and that is possible because it is according to God’s own nature, God does. That’s because God is infinite and omnipotent, not finite and limited in power as we are. As stated in the above article, God does not choose between good and evil as we do. But God also does not choose between two different good paths, as we do. God follows both paths simultaneously, because unlike us, God is present everywhere, in all time and space, all at once. I.e., once again, God is infinite, not finite.
There are other fallacies that prevent any real understanding of these things. But just these two together vitiate all the historical arguments both inside and outside of Christianity about God, God’s freedom, and God’s creation of the universe.
Any argument that is built on a false foundation cannot help drawing false conclusions. And that is exactly the story of the deteriorating doctrinal state of Christianity, which has become more and more false over the centuries as its fundamental falsities have wormed their way into every idea and argument, resulting in an entirely false view of God, of creation, of salvation, and of every other important doctrine of the church.
In Nicene Christianity, the fundamental falsity of them all is the Trinity of Persons, which divides the one God into three gods, and therefore vitiates and destroys every other doctrine of the church, one after the other.
First, falsity must be cleared from the mind. Only then can truth begin to take root there.
Before any clear concept of these things is possible, at minimum one must banish from one’s mind the Trinity of Persons, the idea that God exists within the arrow of time, and the idea that God created the universe out of nothing. There are other falsities that must be banished as well, but these are central ones that will prevent any true understanding of these issues until they are completely rejected and banished from one’s mind.
Well thank for that excellent response. I for one find it hard to conceive the idea but as you pointed out it has to do with our nature of seeing Time. But it’s an answer to consider.
If you don’t mind, i would like to learn more about this idea of God creating Adam and eve now or past being now for God. Was it just a metaphor to convey how it might be for God or there is some Swedenborgian writing on this. While the general intuitive idea is that God witnesses this unfolding of ever-growing “Now”. It’s really interesting to look the new perspective that seems so counterintuitive.
Hi Saran,
Yes, Swedenborg got quite explicit about this, though his comments on God being non-temporal are scattered here and there throughout his writings rather than being something he took up in a focused and sustained way in, say, a chapter of one of his books. Here is one particularly explicit statement:
“Divine providence” is simply one element of God, so if “it” sees the whole future as present, this means that God sees the whole future as present. This is also stated explicitly in another snippet from the same book:
And in a section from another book he says that the past and the future are present for God:
The closest Swedenborg gets to taking up the non-temporality of God in a sustained way is in Divine Love and Wisdom #73–76, where he takes up the proposition, “Divinity is in all time, nontemporally.” I’ve linked the first section so you can read it for yourself if you want. Here, Swedenborg spends more time talking about the nature of time than of how God relates to time, but he does make this statement:
Saying that “they are not sequential in God” is the same as saying that for God, they are all experienced simultaneously, not stretched out in any arrow of time. This is also what Swedenborg is driving at when he says that the infinite things in God “are all one.”
There are other places here and there in Swedenborg’s writings in which he speaks of God seeing the future as the present, and makes related statements. See, for example, True Christianity #30–31, which is his second most sustained treatment of God and time.
Put all of these statements together, and it becomes clear that according to Swedenborg, God sees everything that to us is past, present, and future in and from a single present moment.
Another way of saying this is what I said in my previous comment: From God’s perspective, God is now doing all the things that we see as having happened in the past, such as creating Adam and Eve, and all the things that for us are in the future as well.
This is not something our finite minds can experience, although angels in heaven do have a sense of timelessness that, in a sense, includes both the past and the future. But angels still don’t know the future the way God does. They still experience things sequentially, even if this doesn’t involve material-world time as we know it. But as Swedenborg points out in the Divine Love and Wisdom sections linked above, we can get some sense of this even here on earth by how our mind seems to operate independently of fixed, earthly time, encapsulated in the old saying, “Time flies when you’re having fun.”