James Holmes and the Free Will Excuse

I call this the free will excuse because that's what it is. It's an attempt by believers to excuse God for the massacre in Colorado by James Holmes. I've already suggested reasonable ways a good God could've acted to avert this tragedy but didn't. Now I want to briefly address the objection that God does not interfere with our free choices, even if that means some of us will do heinous crimes on occasion.

If God doesn't interfere then there is no way he could ever answer any prayers involving other people. Don't bother praying for anyone to be saved, since God won't interfere with one's free will. Nor for safety when traveling, since a drunk may cross the center line and crash into you of his own free will. Don't pray for the cessation of conflicts around the world either. Don't even pray over your meal, since a food handler may have been negligent such that it contains toxic levels of e-coli bacteria. I had already mentioned this.

If God does interfere on some occasions then let me humbly suggest he should at least interfere when it comes to the most heinous of crimes. Why bother answering a prayer that a baseball, basketball, or football team wins a game when he should reserve his interference for the times when he is needed the most? It's these kind of heinous crimes that we should see him interfering with by stopping before they happen. Since we don't see him doing anything about them it's clear he doesn't interfere with anything at all. And if he doesn't interfere at all then his existence is indistinguishable from his non-existence.

Furthermore, I think it's obvious that the more power someone has to avert a tragedy then the more of a moral responsibility he has to interfere with it. If I encountered a gang of thugs beating up some kid I cannot be expected to physically stop them. But a superman who came upon them doing so should. So also with God, the ultimate superman.

The fact of the matter is that we do not have as much free will as commonly supposed, if we have any at all, as I wrote about here. Since we don't have that much free will anyway, there should be no objection to interfering when someone wants to commit a heinous crime like James Holmes did.

If an omniscient God somehow needs to judge us then he can judge our thoughts and intentions alone. He should therefore stop people like James Holmes dead in his tracks before he acts on his thoughts.

That he does not do this is strong convincing proof, empirical proof, that such a God does not exist. The extent of suffering in our world makes the existence of God implausible.

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