THE GOLDEN THREAD:

Atheism and Evil (Michael Novak, July 29, 2008, First Things)

The Jewish Creator offered every woman and man in his creation his friendship, and in this way treated each as a free person, not as a slave. Such human liberty required God to create a world in which human beings can of their own deliberate choice turn away from the good. This is how Aquinas defined human sin: a considered and willful deviation from the good, an absence of the good, a deficiency.

“The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time,” Thomas Jefferson wrote. The leaders of the Anglo-American Enlightenment believed that liberty was God’s underlying purpose in creating human beings, and in shaping the rest of creation accordingly. They believed that in the war between the Americans and the British in 1776, though both worshiped the same God, the God of liberty would favor those who fought for freedom, not against it.

A world in which liberty can flower must be a world of laws, regularities, and probabilities, but also a world of contingency, happenstance, serendipity, surprise, and suspense. All the stuff of a good story depends on creation being not just a world of iron logic and inflexible arithmetic, but also a world of immense crisscrossing variation and “blooming, buzzing profusion.”

Even the “angelic” light of advanced mathematics (so highly abstract and removed from corporeality) must in a world of liberty be constituted not only by arithmetic, geometry, and deductive reasoning, but also by the statistically random.

In such a world, there cannot be human freedom without the possibility of falling away from the good. [...]

From what we know of the world we live in, the Creator, it would seem, was no utopian, and his purpose was not to make a world solely for human pleasure, painlessness, and comfort. The world instead provides a tapestry of human experience, times of joy and times of trial—even a vale of sorrows—in which the golden thread of history is liberty.

That is, at least, the Judeo-Christian story, and I’m sticking to it.