Page earned a doctorate inastrophysics from Caltech. After that he was Stephen Hawking’s postdocassistant at Cambridge for three years (1976-79).
Here’s a part of his overallposition, which also includes elements of a natural law theodicy.
Science reveals theintelligibility of the universe;The Bible reveals theIntelligence behind the universe.
I have often said thatnothing I have learned in science has challenged my faith so much as theproblem of evil, which confronts everyone and which has been discussed at leastas far back as the Book of Job in the Bible. For me the problem of evil isperhaps somewhat exacerbated by the fact that I do not believe in human freewill in what is called the incompatibilist sense, meaning free will that isincompatible with determinism.
Free will in the contrarycompatibilist sense means the freedom to act according to one’s wishes anddecisions, which I believe does exist. I would agree with Arthur Schopenhauerthat “Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.”
Here if I speak of “freewill” without an explicit modifier, I mean it in the libertarian orincompatibilist sense, the ability to make choices that are not fullydetermined by causes outside the person, such as God. However, I do not wish tocontradict beliefs or doctrines of the existence of free will, since if it isinterpreted in the compatibilist sense, I have no opposition to that idea.
If libertarian human freewill were to exist, one might say that the ultimately responsibility for theactions of a person would lie in the free-will choices of that person, perhapsabsolving God of the ultimate responsibility for the evil the person were tocommit. However, there still might be the question of why God would permit a personto carry out an evil libertarian free will choice that hurts others. As StevenWeinberg notes, “It seems a bit unfair to my relatives to be murdered in orderto prove an opportunity for free will for Germans, but even putting that aside,how does free will account for cancer? Is it an opportunity of freewill fortumors?”
On the other hand, if freewill does not exist, then one might say that the ultimate responsibility for aperson’s actions would lie in the ultimate determining cause or causes outsidethe person, that is, God, if God is indeed the ultimate cause. This might seemto heighten the problem of reconciling evil with the idea of a perfectly goodGod.
Lest people think that theywould be absolved of responsibility for their actions in a world without freewill, I should hasten to say that I believe that the person would still haveresponsibility in the sense of respond-ability–the ability to respond to moraldemands placed on him or her, even if the response is completely determined byexternal causes (which include those moral demands). Therefore, he or she canbe held accountable for not obeying those demands. I do not believe that a lackof free will means that one can be justified in expecting not to be punishedfor one’s evil deeds, or that society does not have the right to carry out suchpunishment. Indeed, such punishment can be viewed as a good cause for improvingsociety and the welfare of its individuals.
In Romans 9:19-21, theApostle Paul essentially says someone may ask how God blame us if He determinesour actions. Paul does not take this opportunity to deny determinism by God andsay that we have free will, but rather he defends God’s right to do what Hechooses. I think this passage shows that God can hold us responsible even if itis His will that determines what we do.
Part of my scepticism aboutfree will comes from my belief that the simplest theories of physics consistentwith our observations are deterministic, though this is controversial. Forexample, quantum theory is often considered to be indeterministic. Someinterpretations of quantum theory give probabilities of possible events, butthen which event actually happens is a matter of chance and is not determinedby the theory. (The random choice of which event actually occurs is called thecollapse of the quantum state or wave function.)
However, there are severaldifferent interpretations of quantum theory. One that appears simplest to meand which seems to have become adopted among a majority, though not by all, ofmy theoretical cosmology colleagues (but perhaps only among a minority of allphysicists) is the so-called Everett “many worlds” view. This model postulatesthat all possible outcomes that quantum theory predicts as possible really dooccur, so that the totality of outcomes evolve deterministically, with norandom collapse of the quantum state. It is true that one cannot predictuniquely which individual outcome will occur (since there is not just one). Soeach particular outcome may seem random, but if indeed all outcomes occur, thetotality is not random but instead is uniquely determined by the initialquantum state and its evolution. Of course, this does not mean that it isdetermined apart from God, but rather in a theistic view one might postulate thatGod creates and determines the entire quantum state and its evolution.
For me an even moreconvincing reason for not believing that humans have free will is that Ipersonally think the simplest belief, and the simplest interpretation of theBible (such as Romans 9:19-21), is that God completely creates, causes, anddetermines everything other than Himself from nothing outside Himself. (Byeverything, I am excluding logically necessary truths like theorems ofmathematics that I believe can be neither created nor destroyed. Here I alsoexclude God from “everything.”). The meaning of creation from nothing (otherthan God) that makes most sense to me is that what God creates, He completelycauses and completely determines, though many theists disagree with me.
I see at least these twomutually exclusive e possibilities for the world:
1. God creates and fullydetermines everything
2. There occur free-willchoices not determined by God.
Most theists appear tobelieve the second possibility, but to me the first possibility seems simplerand more in accord with what I see the Bible says. Thus it seems to me that thesimplest biblical view of God is that He completely creates, causes, anddetermines everything from nothing outside Himself. That is, I believe that allcausal chains ultimately go back to God.
I essentially follow theviewpoint of the great seventeenth century mathematician and philosopher,Gottfried Leibniz, in his book Theodicy, that this is the best possible world.The idea is that it is the whole that is the best possible, and not necessarilyeach part in isolation. One can see creation as a tapestry, and our view ofnearby threads does not show the entire pattern that God creates. One mightwonder why God does not make each individual part the best possible, but thismight not be logically compatible with optimizing the whole. The good of thewhole and of a given part may logically compete. Even God is not immune fromlogical necessity, so in order to create the best, He may need to have some ofthe individual parts not appear best if they were viewed in isolation.
I agree that there probablymust be a trade-off between competing goods, even though I find the idea oflibertarian free will implausible. Therefore, the free-will theodicy does notsatisfy me intellectually. It also does not satisfy me morally in that I do notsee that the value of free will would justify the evils that supposedly arosefrom it.
In the Everett “many worlds”version of quantum theory, a person is continually branching into many copies(each copy in a different Everett “world,” which should not be confused withthe entire world of all that exists). Even with exactly the same genes andprevious experiences (the same “nature” and “nurture”), the outcomes in thedifferent Everett “worlds” will be different. In ours Hitler was an evilmonster. But I suspect that in most Everett “worlds” with the same early“nature” and “nurture” for Hitler, he was not nearly so evil. (Of course, thereis the slip side: in most Everett “worlds,” Mother Teresa also did not turn outso good as she did in ours.)
I believe that it is aconsequence of the laws of physics that when a person is faced with a moralchoice, in some Everett “worlds” in which that choice is made, an evil choiceis made, one that reduces the total happiness of the conscious beings in thatEverett “world.” There will also be Everett “worlds” in which a good choice ismade, which increases total happiness. (One might postulate that Jesus was anexception, choosing to incarnate Himself with no quantum amplitude to make anyevil choices).
D. Page, “The Superb Design,”D. Marshall, ed. Faith Seeking Understanding: Essays in Memory of Paul Brandand Ralph Winter (William Carey Library 2012), chap. 15.
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