72. Why God can’t force us to will the good
72. WHY GOD CAN’T FORCE US TO WILL THE GOOD
Are there things the omnipotent God can’t do? Is this one of them?
If it’s not impossible for God to force us to will the good, why doesn’t He do it?.
Violence can prevent the exterior members from executing the will’s command. But as to the will’s own proper act, violence cannot be done to the will. . . (For) what is compelled or violent is from an exterior principle. . .
God, Who is more powerful than the human will, can move the will of man, according to Prov. 21:1: The heart of the king is in the hand of the Lord; whithersoever He will, He shall turn it. But if this were by compulsion, it would no longer be by an act of the will, nor would the will itself be moved, but something else against the will. . . . In like manner, a man may be dragged by force, but it is contrary to the very nature of violence that he be thus dragged of his own will. . . .
Violence is directly opposed to the voluntary, as likewise to the natural. For the voluntary and the natural have this in common, that both are from an intrinsic principle, whereas violence is from an extrinsic principle. And for this reason, just as in things devoid of knowledge violence effects something against nature, so in things endowed with knowledge it effects something against the will. Now that which is against nature is said to be unnatural and in like manner that which is against the will is said to be involuntary (I-II,4,5-6).
A meaningless self-contradiction does not suddenly become meaningful just because you say God can do it. “A free choice that is forced or compelled” is a meaningless self-contradiction. It means “a choice that is both voluntary and involuntary at the same time”. What is voluntary comes from the will; what is forced comes to the will from outside and prevents it from doing what it will.
You may think you are being reverent or pious by saying that God can do what is in itself self-contradictory and therefore meaningless, but all you are saying is that God can do nonsense, which is like saying that God can do smrvvmff ffrvvmm. It does not even rise to the dignity of error or heresy. It says literally nothing.
God cannot and does not move the will from the outside, by violence (that is the meaningless self-contradiction), but only from inside, voluntarily; by love, not by force. When we choose to love, that is God operating on and in and through our will, our free will. God turns our freedom on, not off.
This is a necessary part of the answer to the atheist’s No. 1 argument against God, the “problem of evil”: if God is all-powerful and all-good, why doesn’t He wipe out all evil? The hardest part of this question to answer is the deepest evil of all: Hell. Why doesn’t God eradicate Hell? Because that would eradicate free choice. If we were forced into Heaven against our will, we would not be happy because we would not get what we will. Scratch the surface of free will and you find, necessarily, underneath it, the possibility of moral evil and even Hell, in the end.
If God respects our freedom that much, how dare we respect each other’s freedom less? How dare we try to compel one another’s will, override another’s will, by violence? It is not only wicked, it is stupid, because it is impossible.
On the other hand, God can and does influence our will—freely, not violently; from within, not from without; by appeal to love, not force. We can and should do the same to each other.