The Mandate Of Heaven

The Merman's Children, Book  Two, IV.

"...bad luck struck down on misjudgment - unless everything was the will of Heaven..." (p. 101)

Given the premise of an omnipotent Creator from nothing of everything other than Himself, then every single event must be "...the will of Heaven..." (p. 101)

If a storm throws a ship off course, then the Creator could have prevented that storm. Indeed, He caused it. Decades ago, CS Lewis persuaded me that God was like the author of a novel. Even if his characters act consistently and fully in accordance with their fictional personalities as created by him, the author controls the course of fictional events towards the preplanned conclusion of his novel. A storm occurs only if he decides that it does. He probably follows the rule that too much coincidence is unacceptable in fiction although, at the same time, some coincidences do occur. What looks like a coincidence to a character/creature is not a coincidence to an author/the Creator. It cannot be. The Creator is not a limited deity controlling only some aspects of nature as against others. Everything that goes one way He could have made go another way. Lewis thought that creatures had "free will" and therefore could thwart their Creator by damning themselves even despite His attempts to save them. I now think that freedom of choice/absence of constraint makes sense between finite creatures but not between such creatures and their Creator. He could have made us either immune to temptation or strong-willed enough to resist it. We confidently predict that a good person or "saint" will never even think of torturing a child and yet do not think that such goodness makes a person unfree. A saint is indeed free to torture a child... Good people are not automata any more than their Creator is. And I do not believe in such a Creator. I am merely following through the logic of a particular belief.