Star Wars and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy Series) - Kevin Decker [7]
For religious philosophers, such as Augustine and Aquinas, God may infuse “grace” into the minds and hearts of those who invite it, and deny it to those who refuse it. And this grace may influence a person’s will, usually toward goodness. But the reception of grace requires the compliance of the person’s own will. The only way to receive God’s grace is not to reject it, and someone can avoid being infused with grace by willing against it. Thus, by creating human beings with freedom of will, God limits his own power to control our lives; God can pull only those strings in our will that we let him—though he can still pull the strings of everything around us.
In this sense, God has about as much power over us as the Emperor does over Luke and Vader. The Emperor believes he has a power over others’ wills that he can’t have, because, although he’s a powerful Sith Lord, he’s ultimately a limited, mortal being. God, on the other hand, is omnipotent (all-powerful) and thus could have exercised total control over everything he has created—including us! For example, God could have designed us as mindless automatons just as the Kaminoans modified the genetic structure of the Republic’s clone troopers to make them “less independent” and “totally obedient, taking any order without question.” But God chose to create us with freedom of will and thereby elected to limit his own power to pull our strings. Though omnipotent, even God can’t control us because of the way he created us. This allows us to be responsible for our moral choices and merit whatever reward or punishment we deserve.
But even if there might be no future to be determined and also no infallible cosmic puppet-master, we haven’t escaped the possibility of fate. It could be that the mere truth of what philosophers call “future-contingent propositions”—statements about the future—requires that events unfold in a determinate fashion. Various views of fate actually predate much of the religious philosophy we’ve been talking about—the ancient Sumerian culture, the Homeric epics (Iliad and Odyssey), and the best Greek tragedies all concern themselves with fate.
In his De interpretatione, Aristotle raises the issue of fate by noting that one can truthfully say at any time that “Either there will be a sea-battle tomorrow or there won’t be.” Now this is about as uninformative as a statement can get—imagine a Rebel strategist telling Admiral Ackbar and Lando Calrissian “Either you will destroy the Death Star when you reach Endor or you won’t.” Nevertheless, Aristotle continues, if someone says “There will be a sea-battle tomorrow,” she may be right, for there may indeed be a sea-battle tomorrow. But she may also be wrong, for there may not be a sea-battle tomorrow.
Let’s say there is a sea-battle and the person who says so is right even though she lacks the benefit of omniscient foreknowledge. The fact that the proposition “There will be a sea-battle tomorrow” is true today seems to determine that there will indeed be a sea-battle tomorrow. How could there not be unless the proposition is false? If it was true at the time of The Phantom Menace that Obi-Wan would later die at Vader’s hands in A New Hope, then Obi-Wan must die at that time. But Obi-Wan ceased fighting, held up his lightsaber, and allowed Vader to kill him—an apparently free, but mysterious, action.
One way to answer this apparent fatalism is by noting once again where the chain of causality starts. If the proposition “Obi-Wan will die at Vader’s hands