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Free Will and the Will of God.
How free is our free will? How far does it extend. Limits must be there. At one extreme, we are not free to do the undoable deed. A close examination of what we are given in the Urantia Papers tells us more about what we can do than what we cannot do.
Primarily, we are free to make our own personal choice regarding our eternal destiny. And no force, creator, or agency in the whole of the universes is permitted to interfere with that choice. In this regard, the Universal Father has decreed the absolute sovereignty of the mortal free will. (71)
Furthermore, any form of coercion in our making of that choice is positively excluded. The gate to eternity opens "only in response to the freewill choice of the freewill sons of the God of free will." (71)
If we wish to understand some of the peculiarities of the Urantia Papers, and particularly so if we are inclined to have a fundamentalist attitude towards them, we may need to spend considerable time and effort in analyzing what we consider would constitute coercion or interference with "the freewill choice of a freewill son of the God of free will."
The Urantia Papers inform us that we are free to choose eternal life but there is a condition. If we do so, we must commit ourselves to seeking to do things in God's way under all circumstances. If we reject God's will as also being our will, then when and if our decision is final, we sentence ourselves to oblivion. So how much free will do we really have?
Surely these terms are no different, in principle, from what a horse trainer does. When he wants a horse to obey a command, he endeavors to place it in a situation in which obedience brings peace and quiet and disobedience brings the opposite. The law or rules of human societies operate on the same principle--reward for compliance, punishment of some kind for disobedience. In respect to eternal life, our choice is to accept or reject God's will for us.
The Urantia Papers inform us that entry into God's "kingdom" is by faith and faith alone. They also inform us that God both exists and is "good." It follows that the eternal life promised by a good God must also be good--so good in fact that to miss out would be deprivation of good, hence "bad." But our acceptance of these claims must be by faith alone, not through proof.
How real could our compulsory "by faith" decision be if the Urantia Papers provided positive proof for both the existence and goodness of God?
In analyzing our situation, it may appear to us that having always to choose the will of God is actually a sacrifice, a foregoing of our free will. This really means our preference is to indulge the apparent delights of selfish behavior than to forego them by choosing God's way--which is to serve our associates rather than to exploit them.
This preference derives directly from inherited evolutionary animal behavior patterns. Mostly such behavior is associated with sex or hunger--the relief of tension derived from completion of sexual intercourse, and the relief from anxiety resulting from the "ownership" of a personal territory providing a haven of security and freedom from hunger. Nature has coupled these behavior patterns in such a way that, in the long run, they serve to perpetuate the species.
At base, animal behavior is self-serving. It is so because related behavior patterns do the necessary job of ensuring species survival. There is no other purpose. And, in fact, there is no "Nature" supervising the operation. It exists because it works.
Human behavior is a modified form of animal behavior brought about by imprinting upon animal behavior patterns, a sense of morality and duty, a striving for meaning, the differentiating of fact from non-fact, right from wrong, plus a desire to worship, all these derived from cosmic mind. Personality also stamps specific attributes upon us that tend to modify behavior, among them self-consciousness, competence in decision making, and the activation of attributes associated with cosmic mind. On top of all that comes the influence of our personal indwelling spirit of God.
We humans have all the necessary attributes to make freewill decisions. But the powers that be have decreed that for one special decision we must not be coerced. That special decision is to forever choose God's will in preference to our own. This same decision is also described as "entry into the kingdom, the "choosing of eternal life," "salvation," etc. And it must be by faith and faith alone. This is stated in numerous forms:
"Salvation...is to be had only by believing, by simple and sincere faith" (1584); "The attainment of salvation is by faith and faith alone" (1593); "Faith, simple childlike faith is the key to the door of the kingdom" (1861); "Faith alone will pass you through its portals." (1569); "the individual becomes God-knowing only by faith." (1124).
It logically follows that the authors of the Urantia Papers had no choice other than to avoid providing positive proof of the authority of their revelation. We had to have good reason to doubt anything and everything in the Papers.
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