And still I get no answer.
I've thought long and hard about choice and agency. It seems that God was so adamant that we have agency. And yet, I wonder to myself, if I do anything good what so ever, credit goes to him? Where then is the incentive to do good? I need credit, simply for motivation sake. I need some sort of feed back that I'm a better person or deserve happiness because I did good. Else, God says 'You do what you will, but if you do good, then give the credit to me.' And I say, 'ha. I'm no fool.'
But then I got thinking. (As usually happens when I'm awake or conscious... which makes me wonder: are we sleeping or awake if we are knocked unconscious?) Anyway, I got thinking. Why would I give God credit for something that I did myself? I asked, 'why would I, who did all the work, say to my maker that he gets credit for how I used my time? Yes he made me, but I'm a living choosing being, so why does that give him gratification and glory every time I do something good? Does that mean I don't get any credit if I do something good?
And then I had a thought that I don't know how it got there (this was a while back, mind you). I'm not sure if I saw the action, or heard it somewhere or made it up, but it explained the answer very well, and maybe the credit goes to him. ;)
It’s a very simple analogy. It's quite simply like a child learning to walk. The child must be prompted at first by parents to take those steps, mom once or dad another, urging the little one forward. The parents teach the child to take steps and use their feet in the process of learning to walk. Then, as the child begins to learn, the parents are needed less and less to guide them in walking, but then the child needs the parents to lean on when they are learning to tie their shoes, and to steady them as they learn to ride their bike or to pick them up if they fall down. The child needs them there to give them support and love.The credit at first goes to the parents that the child can walk, and even after the child learns to walk, there is credit due the parent, but it's almost entirely due to their coaching of the child as they learned how to walk. The child eventually learns to walk on his or her own but the child learns to choose when and where to walk, and that is not to the parent's credit. Where, and when the child walks is no longer credited to the parent, only that they taught the child to walk.
In the same way, God teaches us goodness, or truth, and we give credit to the help he gives, but then God gives us wings to fly and we choose where to go. He prompts us, gives us signs, but he will not force us, it must be our choice to fly back to him.
1 comment:
Interesting. This is a crude sort of parallel, but I suppose the universe is kind of like a grand multilevel marketing scheme. Each cause deserves credit for the effect it brought into existence. For example, if you're walking down the sidewalk and there's a beautiful beetle stuck upside down and you bend down to right it, and just at that moment a baseball whizzes above you just where your head would have been, then the beetle should get credit for saving you from a painful introduction to the round intruder. But then you could start to wonder, what caused the beetle to be there at that moment? Shouldn't the beetle's cause also get credit for the good luck to which you were recipient? The beetle's parents probably helped decide the timing and location of the beetle's birth which affected its position and so forth. If you go on up the chain of cause and effect, back millions of years, and suddenly there are a lot of things that deserve credit for who you are and what you do.
And if you believe in God, then I suppose that would be the "ultimate cause" or in Aristotle's words, the "first cause", and so he (or she) should get credit for everything.
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