Somebody does something appalling. The usual response is that they should not have, and that something should now happen to them. Both halves of that assume they could have done otherwise.
Take that assumption away and the whole structure comes apart. Not softens — comes apart, because you cannot punish somebody for executing the design they were built to execute. This material takes the argument at full strength, applies it to a God who knows everything in advance, and finds a medieval rabbi who had already said it and been banned for saying it. So the question is worth asking bluntly. If it was all going to happen anyway, why blame anyone?
The two poles are set out fairly before anything is argued. At one end, all actions are considered predestined and free will is thought to be purely an illusion. At the other, total free will is claimed for man as a self-conscious living creature.1
And the concession comes early, which is unusual. This controversy will rage unto eternity. Nothing said here will be anywhere near conclusive for the great many people following mainstream religions, which maintain that everything is known to God before it happens and that Divine Knowledge knows no limit.1
That is the real opponent, and it is named accurately. The problem is not people who think choice is an illusion. It is the ordinary devout position that God knows in advance, which most believers hold without ever noticing what it costs them.
The counter-argument comes from some of the more esoterically minded, and it is precise. If man is truly free to do certain things, it is impossible that God should be aware of such actions in advance of their happening.1
What God does know is then specified rather than merely reduced. Divinity knows the order of an individual's life — that is, the different possibilities open to that person. What it does not know is how that individual will choose in particular circumstances, since everybody has the power to choose among the possibilities open to them.1
The name attached is Rabbi Levi ben Gershon, Gersonides, the Ralbag, described as famous and infamous in the same breath. He held this position to be not only the most rational one but to be in accord with the words of Sacred Writ, which he then set out to prove.1
And the reception is reported with some relish. The view caused many Rabbis to go rabid, and to forbid their students to read the works of the Ralbag.1 A position about the limits of divine knowledge got a man's books put out of reach of students.
The argument for it is then made in the plainest terms available. Reward and punishment — and Karma for that matter — will be nonsensical if all actions are predestined.2 Plain common sense is what gets cited for it, and nothing more.
And the hard cases are named rather than avoided. Why should anybody be punished or rewarded for any action — even in the case of murder, rape, and every nasty action you can think of — when that person is only doing what they were designed, destined, in fact even coerced to do anyway?2
Which gives the charge, and it is aimed upward. Without the ability of free choice, punishment or reward would be not only unfair but rather malicious on the part of a supposedly omniscient Creator.2 So the incoherence is not the criminal's problem. It belongs to whoever set the thing up, and that is where the charge is aimed.
Then the picture that makes it vivid. This Creator made beings able to recognise themselves, their environment and the Creator in a fully conscious manner. Then it constrained them into acting out scenarios that might hurt or benefit them, with none of it mattering to a Supreme Creator whose only aim is that the Divine Will be done.2
The determinist God is then given a speech, and hearing it said aloud is the argument:
"My 'game' is to give you the freedom to think, to reason for yourself, but I will not allow you to act freely on your thoughts. All your actions will be as I determine. I will create a multitude of possibilities, but will allow you only to act on the choice that you are fated to make, and in all this you will be punished and rewarded for that deed, which will appear to you to have been of your own choice, but which was actually determined by me."2
Nothing in that is a caricature. It is what the ordinary devout position amounts to when somebody writes it out in the first person. The last clause is the one nobody says out loud.
And the objection that follows is an engineering one rather than a moral one. There would be no need to create multitudes of possibilities if you were destined, even compelled, to act out only one of them.2 A menu nobody can order from is not a menu. It is a wall with pictures on it.
The alternative gets a speech too, and it is much longer. It starts from kinship rather than from authority:
"Since you are part of Me, I created you in the love and compassion I have for myself. My 'game' will be to give you the freedom to think and reason for yourself, and I will allow you to act freely on that awareness within the manifested realm of experience. I will not only allow you to comprehend your awareness, but to expand it, in order for you to recognise more and more choices within the 'all-possible-possibilities.'"3
Then a warning that most consoling theology leaves out:
"Understand this however, I created all possibilities, and in certain circumstances what appears to be benevolent may be malevolent; in others what appears malevolent may be benevolent."3
And then the part that removes the judge:
"I create the possibilities, you make the choices, but know that you will be affected by your choices for good or ill. I love you and will not punish or reward you, since your free will allows you to reward or punish yourself through your actions. I cannot stop you from being rewarded or punished by your own exploits, without seriously obstructing the whole process of consciousness awakening unto itself. So be warned! You will not be punished for your mistaken choices, but by them, and likewise you will reap reward from beneficial choices."3
Note what the last sentence does. Consequence is left completely intact and the sentencing is gone. And the reason given for not intervening is not mercy but mechanics — stepping in would obstruct consciousness waking up.
The section closes by putting the question to the reader rather than by declaring a winner. Which would you choose as the more comfortable, Predestination or Free Will? Either choice has its comfort zone and its dangers.3
The case for the other side is made honestly, which is rare. Maybe it is easier to allow a Divine Being to plan for you, and then to act according to Its whims, whether they benefit you or not.3 That is a real advantage, and it is not sneered at anywhere.
Against it, the cost is stated with the difficulty included. It is difficult to decide for yourself where you want to steer your life, and it somehow gives you a casting vote over your destiny — a possibility fraught with peril and uncertainty.3
And the last clause names who takes that bargain. It is what appears so attractive to those regulators of consciousness who call themselves Kabbalists and even Magicians.3 Not the wise, and not the devout. Regulators of consciousness, which is a job description rather than a title.
You want to know what changes if you actually hold this position rather than admire it.
Start by dropping the sentencing and keeping the consequence, since that is the whole of the second speech. You are not punished for your mistaken choices but by them. So the question after a bad outcome is what the choice actually did, which is investigable. Whether you deserved it is not, and it is the question people spend the time on.
Then treat awareness as the thing that grows the option set. More and more choices become recognisable within the all-possible-possibilities as awareness expands. So the practical response to feeling trapped is the same as it was two sections ago: assume there are more moves, and go looking for them.
Then hold the warning about appearances, because it is the least comfortable line in either speech. What looks benevolent may be malevolent and what looks malevolent may be benevolent — which means the freedom on offer comes without any guarantee that you can tell a good choice from a bad one at the time of choosing.
And notice which comfort you are actually taking. Both positions have one. Being planned for is genuinely easier, and a casting vote over your own destiny is genuinely frightening, and anybody who claims to hold the second while wanting the reassurances of the first has not chosen yet.
Gersonides is real and the position attributed to him is broadly his. His view that God knows possibilities rather than particular future free choices was genuinely controversial. His works were genuinely treated with suspicion by other rabbis, so the reception described here is not invented.
The argument itself is not novel and does not need to be. That reward and punishment presuppose the ability to do otherwise is one of the oldest objections in philosophy, and its force does not depend on anything Kabbalistic.
Tension left open. The second speech has the Divine One create all possibilities and then decline to punish, on the grounds that intervening would obstruct consciousness awakening. But the possibilities include murder and rape, named earlier on this page, and the speech says nothing about the people those choices land on. The whole account is addressed to the chooser, and the victim is not in it anywhere.
🚩 PRACTITIONER SOURCE. 🚩 Both Divine speeches are the author's own compositions, presented as illustration rather than as revelation, and should not be read as quotations of anything. 🚩 Gersonides is cited without a work or a passage. 🚩 Plain common sense informs us is doing the work of the argument in the central section.
Set this against the fate material earlier in the same chapter and the two are not the same doctrine. There, all events are Fated and free will governs only how they are expressed — a closed set of outcomes, with freedom operating inside it.
Here, the Divine One does not know how that individual will choose in particular circumstances, and creating possibilities nobody can select from is called pointless. That is a genuinely open future, not a fixed one with free expression inside it.
The two can be joined if fated means only that the possibilities exist rather than that the outcome is settled, and the wording sometimes supports that. But the aircraft section says one of two complete events was realised and the other was not, which is a claim about outcomes rather than about menus. What is never done is the reconciling: a reader is given a closed and an open future in adjacent sections, and told both are what the tradition holds.
The Serpent Who Blamed the Maker and Got Away With It — eastern-spirituality.
A serpent has been danced on until his hoods are pulp. He comes round, folds his hands, and instead of apologising makes an argument. We are wicked because of our birth… people find it extremely difficult to give up their innate nature. Then he names who made the nature: O creator! You have created the universe, with its gunas… We are serpents and we are born angry. How can we abandon your maya? You yourself confound us. You are the cause behind this.
That is this page's argument, made by the defendant, inside a fully determinist system. And the astonishing part is the verdict. The argument is accepted. He is not corrected, he is not condemned, and he is let go.
Which reveals something this page cannot see from inside its own conclusion. The incoherence is real — you cannot coherently punish a being for executing its design — but there are two ways out of it, not one. Keep the freedom, which is the route taken here. Or keep the determinism and drop the retribution, which is what the serpent's tradition does.
And the second route is the one this page quietly takes as well. Look again at what the free-will God actually says: I love you and will not punish or reward you, and you will not be punished for your mistaken choices, but by them. The punishment has been removed there too. So free will turns out not to be what rescues the moral order. Both systems rescue it the same way, by getting rid of the judge and leaving the consequences running, and the freedom is doing something else entirely.
Sharpest implication. The reason given for divine non-intervention is not mercy and not respect for autonomy. It is that stopping you from suffering your own choices would seriously obstruct the whole process of consciousness awakening unto itself. So your bad outcomes are holding something much larger than you in place, and rescue becomes a technical impossibility rather than a withheld kindness.
Generative questions.