Does God Mess With Free Will?

A few years back in the movie Bruce Almighty, the character Bruce (played by Jim Carry) got to temporarily substitute for God. Bruce was omnipotent except for two rules. He couldn’t tell any one about his powers and he couldn’t change anyone’s desires. He could make people do things, but he couldn’t change their free will.

For economists, this is the ultimate “de gustibus non est disputandum” constraint. Stigler, GJ and Becker, GS (1977). De gustibus non est disputandum. The American.Economic Review, 67(2): 76-90. Even God can’t quarrel with people’s tastes or preferences.

But here’s a biblical pop quiz. When does the God of the Bible violate the Bruce Almighty rule and change people’s desires?

I can think of two examples (which come from my recent stint as a Sunday school teacher), but please let me know if you can think of any others.

The most famous example is that God repeatedly “hardened Pharaoh’s heart” to keep Pharaoh from letting the Israelites go. See for example Exodus 9:12 Apparently God wanted Pharaoh and his people to experience the pain of all the plagues (maybe so that God could prove to the Israelites or the Egyptians what God was capable of dishing out or maybe so God could make Pharaoh look like a fool for flip flopping).

But Pharaoh was not the only villain whose free will God froze. God also hardened the hearts of several enemies of Joshua:

For it was the LORD himself who hardened their hearts to wage war against
Israel, so that he might destroy them totally, exterminating them without mercy,
as the LORD had commanded Moses. Joshua
11:20

But the more disturbing instance of God’s intervention with free will happens at the very beginning of the Bible. We all remember that Eve’s punishment was pain in childbirth. But that was only part of her fate:

16 To the woman he said, "I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with
pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you."

Genesis 3:16

This passage is truly disturbing. At least one interpretation is that God punished women by giving them pain in child birth and making their husbands rule over them. But God seems to have gone further. He had to make sure that women wouldn’t turn away from men (who would subordinate them and through impregnation cause them childbirth pain). So in this passage, God seems to take away women’s freedom to desire whomever they want. God ordains “Your desire will be for your husband.”

The punishment of heterosexuality

The mandatory heterosexuality of women can be read as part of God’s punishment for the fall from grace. Under this reasoning, epidurals and lesbianism are both rebellions against the will of God. Indeed, religious conservatives have argued that Eve’s punishment is evidence that the Bible views homosexuality as sinful.

But seen within the larger pattern of God’s heart hardening, it is more reasonable to view the “your desire will be” heterosexuality as merely part of women’s punishment and not a sign that homosexuality is sinful. Just as it would not be a sin for Pharaoh to let the Israelites go, the punishment of heterosexuality doesn’t mean that it would be a sin for women to desire women.

Indeed, the trifecta reappearance in our world of painless childbirth, the appearance of different sex unions where the man does not rule over the woman (pace MacKinnon) and the appearance of women whose desire is not for their husband might all be signs that the punishment is no longer in effect. You see, sin without free will is not even possible. Pharaoh’s failure to let the Israelites go when his heart was hardened by God cannot in good conscience be considered sinful. The reappearance of choice – of women that choose whether or not to desire husbands – opens up the possibility for sin, but it does not indicate that same-sex desire is sinful. Indeed, it may be a sign that we are step closer to the garden, a step closer to grace.