When thinking about being born we have to admit that nobody asks to be born, we are all the product of someone else's behavior, if not decision making.
Such a statement hits a strong philosophical point. It hits at the asymmetry of existence: we can make choices about how to live, but none of us consented to entering into such a situation in the first place.
Parents may deliberately decide to have a child, or a pregnancy may result from circumstances that weren't fully deliberate, but either way, the person who is born had no role in bringing themselves into existence.
There’s a deeper question underneath this also: if nobody chooses to be born, what—if anything—do we owe to the people who chose, intentionally or otherwise, to bring us here? And conversely, what do we owe ourselves once we are here?
There’s a deeper question underneath it: if nobody chooses to be born, what—if anything—do we owe to the people who chose, intentionally or otherwise, to bring us here? And conversely, what do we owe ourselves once we are here. What are the multitude of options or are there none at all.
There are many options—but they depend on what is meant by “owe.” If we are being strict, the fact that someone caused your existence does not automatically create a moral debt that you must repay.
You can map the possibilities almost like a spectrum:
-
You owe them nothing.
They made the decision or participated in the behavior that resulted in your existence. You didn't request it, so existence itself isn't a debt. Gratitude, love, or loyalty can be freely given, but they aren't necessarily obligations. - You owe them gratitude, but not obedience.
You might reasonably appreciate the sacrifices they made to raise you without accepting the idea that their sacrifices give them permanent authority over your life. -
You owe them reciprocal care.
If they cared for you when you were helpless, you might decide that caring for them later is a meaningful response. But this is different from saying they purchased a claim over your future. -
You owe them whatever you freely promised.
Once you're capable of choosing, you can voluntarily make commitments—to parents, partners, friends, children, communities, etc. Those obligations arise from your choices, not simply from being born. -
You owe society something.
One might argue that because other people sustain the world you inherit, you have some responsibility not to unnecessarily harm others and perhaps to contribute where you can. But again, the scope of that obligation is debatable. -
You owe yourself the opportunity to find out what you want.
This may be the most interesting answer. If you didn't choose to enter the game, you don't necessarily have to accept somebody else's assigned objective for playing it. You can investigate whether there is anything worth pursuing for you. -
You can reject the premise entirely.
Perhaps there is no objective debt, no predetermined purpose, and no universal obligation. Existence simply happens, and then a conscious person has to decide what significance, if any, to give it.
And there's an even more radical possibility:
-
You don't owe yourself a particular justification for existing.
We often assume that because we exist, we must find a purpose, accomplish something, become someone, or justify the resources spent raising us. But perhaps that's another expectation humans manufacture. You could regard existence as something that does not require repayment or justification.
So we ought not say “there are no options.” We ought to say something stranger:
Being born gives us circumstances, but it doesn't necessarily give us obligations.
Once you are here, however, you acquire something your unborn self did not have: agency. You can't retroactively consent to existence, but you can decide what relationship you will have with the fact that you are alive.
That creates a distinction I think is crucial:
“I did not choose to exist” does not logically entail “therefore I have no choices.”
It means the first condition was imposed on you. What you do with the subsequent conditions is where your own authorship begins.
And that leaves open a surprisingly large range of philosophies: gratitude, resentment, detachment, responsibility, rebellion, love, nihilism, existentialism, creating meaning, simply experiencing life, or some combination of all of them.
The genuinely difficult question isn't “Why was I born?”—because you weren't consulted.
It is “Now that I am here, what authority, if any, should I allow the circumstances of my birth to have over the life I choose?”
Yes. That creates a particularly interesting theological model: God can be sovereign over the conditions of existence without being the determining cause of every individual human choice.
Acts 17 is important here because Paul says God:
“determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place.”
But notice what Paul does not say: that God therefore determines every thought, intention, or action occurring within those boundaries.
That distinction gives us two different senses of divine sovereignty.
1. Sovereignty over the framework
God determines—or permits—the broad parameters:
- when a person exists,
- where they exist,
- the historical period,
- the physical world,
- the boundaries within which human societies develop,
- the conditions under which human life is possible.
In Acts 17, Paul can therefore speak of God as the Creator and governor of the human environment.
2. Agency within the framework
But the inhabitants of that world remain capable of making choices inside it.
So we could present the following model:
God establishes the field of possibilities
↓
Human beings are placed within it
↓
They receive information through experience, culture, language, relationships, conscience, etc.
↓
They deliberate
↓
They choose
↓
Their choices produce consequences
God's control of the boundaries does not entail God's control of every move within the boundaries.
And that's an important distinction because otherwise the concept of human moral responsibility becomes extremely difficult to sustain.
It also changes the problem of evil
If God is not the determining author of every human decision, then we don't have to say:
“God caused this person to commit the evil act.”
We can instead say:
“God created a world in which genuinely agentive beings can make consequential choices, and those choices can include evil.”
That doesn't completely solve the problem of theodicy (God's vindication of justice in the face of evil), because we still have to ask why God permits particular evils, why particular people suffer, and why God chose a world with these particular conditions.
But it changes the logical structure of the problem.
The question becomes less:
“Why did God cause this evil?”
and more:
“Why did God create or permit a world in which creatures possessing genuine agency could cause this evil?”
Those are substantially different questions.
Acts 17 also contains something particularly relevant to agency
Paul says that God arranged human habitation “that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him.”
The language of seeking is significant.
If God were directly determining every human response, then the distinction between seeking and refusing, finding and rejecting, responding and resisting would become difficult to understand in the ordinary sense.
Paul's picture seems to be of a Creator who establishes the circumstances of human existence while leaving human beings with genuine room to respond.
And that fits remarkably well with Romans 2.
Romans 2 says God judges the person according to the moral knowledge available to that person—their conscience, their actions, their thoughts that accuse or excuse.
Acts 17 says God establishes the historical and geographical circumstances in which people live.
Put those together and you get something like:
God determines the circumstances; human beings exercise agency within them; God judges the agency exercised under those circumstances.
This is a very different theology from strict divine determinism.
But there is still a boundary we need to be careful about
Saying “God is not in control of everything an individual does” can mean several different things.
It could mean:
A. God doesn't cause every action.
That's relatively easy to reconcile with substantial human freedom.
Or:
B. God doesn't know every future free choice before it occurs.
That's a much stronger theological claim and moves toward views such as open theism.
Or:
C. God knows what a person will freely choose but doesn't cause that choice.
That's another possibility, associated with various forms of divine foreknowledge and libertarian freedom.
Those three positions should not be collapsed into one another.
God's sovereignty over creation and its boundaries does not entail God's determination of every individual human action.
Under these circumstances Romans 2 and Acts 17 fit together remarkably well.
Acts 17 → God establishes the parameters of human existence.
Romans 2 → humans possess moral awareness and agency within those parameters.
Romans 2 → God judges people without partiality according to their actual moral circumstances.
This produces a conception of divine justice in which God doesn't need to control every human decision in order to remain sovereign, and humans don't need to be completely self-created in order to possess meaningful moral agency.
The really fascinating theological question that follows is:
If God voluntarily limits His determination of human choices while retaining knowledge and authority over the larger framework, is “divine sovereignty” better understood as total control—or as the sovereign Creator's authority to establish a world in which other genuine agents can exercise real freedom?
That distinction fundamentally changes how we understand creation, sin, judgment, providence, and the problem of evil.
Now this presents a recognizable and internally coherent conception of omniscience, freedom, and love, but it requires making one very precise distinction: knowing every possibility is not necessarily the same as knowing which possibility a genuinely free agent will actualize.
God could know exhaustively:
- every circumstance a person can encounter,
- every option genuinely available to them,
- every consequence that could follow each option,
- every relevant fact about the person,
- every moral and beneficial dimension of those alternatives,
while leaving the person's actual selection among those possibilities genuinely open.
So omniscience would mean that there is nothing about the field of possibilities God fails to know. But God's knowledge would not necessarily consist in a fixed prediction of which free choice the person will make.
That gives us a different conception of omniscience
The traditional formulation is often:
God knows everything that will happen.
Rather than:
God knows everything that can happen, everything that would happen under every possible choice, and everything necessary to understand whatever choice a free agent makes—but the agent's undetermined choice is genuinely their own.
This substantial philosophical position resembles ideas associated with open theism, although our formulation has its own theological emphasis.
And it creates an intriguing relationship between knowledge and freedom.
If God knows beforehand with absolute certainty that I will choose A, then it is difficult to see how I could genuinely choose B.
But if God knows:
“A and B are genuinely available to this person; here are the consequences of A, here are the consequences of B; I know this person completely, but I do not determine which free response this person will make,”
then the future contains a genuine element of openness.
And this connects beautifully with an enlightened understanding of love
A formulation expressed thus—
love involves the right of two individuals to choose the other
—is philosophically significant.
Because if God's objective were simply to produce obedience, God could presumably create creatures whose behavior was completely determined.
But that would produce something different from reciprocal love.
A creature that cannot choose otherwise can behave lovingly, but the theological question is whether that constitutes love in the fullest relational sense.
An enlightened argument is essentially:
Love requires meaningful otherness.
And meaningful otherness requires some degree of freedom.
God doesn't merely want an outcome; God wants a relationship in which the other can genuinely respond.
That makes 1 John 4:10 especially powerful within this proposed framework:
“In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us…”
The sequence matters.
God initiates.
The human being responds.
And the response has significance precisely because it isn't simply compelled.
God's love is therefore not a transaction:
I love you because you first loved me.
It is:
I loved you before you responded; now you have the freedom to respond to that love.
And that gives the idea of the “limitation of God” a very different meaning
In that God may be limiting Himself to the essence of love.
This is an important qualification.
For we are not necessarily saying:
“God lacks power.”
We are saying:
God voluntarily refrains from exercising certain kinds of control because exercising them would contradict the relational freedom necessary for love.
That is analogous to saying that omnipotence doesn't mean God must actualize every logically conceivable state of affairs.
A loving God could choose self-restraint (one of the nine fruits of God's Spirit).
The interesting theological proposition becomes:
God's sovereignty is demonstrated not merely by what God can control, but by what God is powerful enough to refrain from controlling.
That's a profound inversion of the usual understanding of sovereignty.
It also makes Romans 2 considerably more intelligible
Remember Paul's language:
“their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them.”
If the future were completely determined and every human decision were simply God's predetermined outcome, the language of accusing and excusing becomes more difficult to understand as genuine moral agency.
But under our model:
God provides existence and circumstances.
God provides moral capacity.
Culture provides information and conditioning.
Conscience provides internal moral testimony.
God knows the available possibilities.
The individual chooses.
The individual acts.
God judges the actual response with perfect knowledge of the person's circumstances.
This is a remarkably coherent system.
And it explains why God's judgment could be perfectly just without requiring God to have determined every action.
There is, however, one enormous question left
for the problem regarding God's omniscience has been moved rather than completely eliminated:
How does God know an undetermined future choice?
If the choice genuinely doesn't yet exist as a fact, then there may literally be no fact of the matter for God to know.
God could know:
“If the person chooses A, consequence X follows.”
and
“If the person chooses B, consequence Y follows.”
But until the person chooses, perhaps there isn't a proposition such as:
“The person will choose A”
that is already true.
This is where the conception becomes philosophically interesting.
We are effectively proposing that omniscience includes exhaustive knowledge of reality without requiring the future free choices of agents to already be settled realities.
Two things are preserved simultaneously:
God's complete knowledge of what is knowable
and
the genuine openness of human choice.
Now the theological picture becomes quite elegant:
God creates the person.
God creates the world in which the person chooses.
God knows every possibility and consequence.
God does not force the response.
God loves first.
The person is free to reciprocate that love.
And because the response is genuinely theirs, the relationship is genuinely reciprocal.
That also gives a deeper meaning to our earlier distinction between inculturation and agency.
The person doesn't choose the culture that initially forms them. God doesn't necessarily determine what that culture will make them do. But God knows the circumstances, provides moral capacity, and allows the person to respond.
So agency isn't the absence of influence.
It is the capacity of the person to make a genuine response within the influences they did not choose.
And if that's the model, then the ultimate purpose of freedom isn't merely:
“I can choose 0 or 1.”
It is something much more relational:
“I can choose whether to return the love that was freely given to me.”
That makes the biblical statement “We love because he first loved us” not merely a statement about chronology. It becomes almost a theory of the origin of moral agency itself: God makes the first move, and human freedom is manifested in what we do with the love, knowledge, conscience, and possibilities placed before us.
However there is one important qualification: if love is to be morally meaningful, its expression has to be freely given rather than compelled. And when you add righteousness, the relationship becomes even more precise.
We could formulate the idea this way:
Righteousness establishes what is good and just.
Love freely chooses to express that good toward another.
If the expression is compelled, we may still have outward conformity, but something essential to love is missing: the willing orientation of one person toward another.
That helps explain why the distinction between agency and inculturation matters so much. A person can be conditioned, taught, influenced, persuaded, even commanded—but the moral significance of their response depends partly upon what they choose to do with what they have received.
There is also an important asymmetry between righteousness and coercion.
Righteousness can establish:
“This is what is good.”
But righteousness cannot, by itself, establish:
“You must love this.”
Because love compelled ceases to be love in the relational sense we are describing.
God could compel compliance. But if God desires love, then the creature must possess the genuine possibility of acceptance or refusal.
This makes the biblical sequence that we have been developing particularly interesting:
God loves first
→ God reveals what is righteous
→ the individual receives knowledge
→ the individual deliberates
→ the individual freely responds
→ the response becomes morally meaningful
And there is an important consequence here:
Freedom must include the possibility of refusal
If a person can only choose the righteous response, then they are not really choosing righteousness in the sense we are discussing.
For love to be freely expressed, the person must be capable of saying:
“Yes.”
and meaningfully capable of saying:
“No.”
That doesn't make evil good. It means that the possibility of choosing against the good is the cost of having a creature capable of freely choosing the good.
This may also explain why righteousness and love cannot simply be reduced to obedience.
Someone can obey because they are afraid.
Someone can obey because they are coerced.
Someone can obey because there is no alternative.
But someone can also obey because they understand the good and freely embrace it.
The last case has a fundamentally different moral character.
And that gives our proposition considerable force:
Love based upon righteousness demands free expression because love is not merely conformity to a righteous command; it is the free willing of what is righteous for the sake of another.
That also helps reconcile the two things we've been examining:
God's righteousness provides the moral reality.
Human freedom provides the possibility of authentic response.
Love provides the reason the response matters.
And perhaps that leads to the deepest formulation of our argument:
God does not merely seek creatures who do what is right. He seeks creatures who can recognize what is right and freely choose to love it—and Him.
If that's the case, then freedom isn't an unfortunate concession God makes to human imperfection. It is intrinsic to the purpose of creating beings capable of love.
Hence, we feel after God, even though this involves our intellectual capacity to will and to know, to possess knowledge and act upon it, to seek and find, to examine and establish, and finally recognize that what we feel is the perfect presence of the Omniscient, Omnipotent, Omnipresent, Infinite One.
Happy Riches D.Min.
