God. Real. Right.

This post is next in a long series on this site attempting to address (1) why it is challenging to understand how there could be a free will, (2) that it is much more theologically, philosophically, and ethically crippling to reject its possibility, and finally both (3) that it is possible that there is a free will, and (4) that commitment to the reality of free will renews access to some of the essentials of a Christian worldview, including teleology. Posts to date are compiled here.

3.2.2 That people should not have the creativity and power of God does not change the possibility that they are free.

The uncomfortable implications of such a freedom include at their head that the will appears to be miraculous in its nature, and that Joe seems to be strangely imbued with divine creativity. There is something right about that assessment and something wrong about it.

It is true that the kind of freedom described in this argument allows humanity to insert into the universe that which cannot be sufficiently explained in terms of prior causes. And it is true that the same insufficiency of explanation applies to God.

But, as with every aspect of humanity bearing God’s image, the image is limited. Compare consciousness as an attribute of humanity and of God. God is conscious. Man is conscious. Saying so does not in any way imply that man is God. In the same way, man partakes of an attribute of God, free will, only because God chooses for man to do so, and only to the extent which God allows. There is no assault on the uniqueness of God. So there is nothing strangely divine about humans imbued with the creativity of free will.

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This post is next in a long series on this site attempting to address (1) why it is challenging to understand how there could be a free will, (2) that it is much more theologically, philosophically, and ethically crippling to reject its possibility, and finally both (3) that it is possible that there is a free will, and (4) that commitment to the reality of free will renews access to some of the essentials of a Christian worldview, including teleology. Posts to date are compiled here.

3.2.1 That people do not appear to be free does not change the possibility that they are free.

The phenomenological objection is that people do not appear to act freely. This objection is as plain as the nose on any observant and thoughtful face and manifests itself in practically every venue of life. On highways drivers are strangely animalistic, running in packs of cars and adjusting and maintaining speeds based on stimuli from, for example, the drivers around them, usually without any awareness of what they are doing and why they are doing it. In homes, parents and children spiral around each other in relational systems governed by hidden but practically omnipotent stases. Because they have no idea why their daughter is running amok, they seek counsel from someone who can explain the invisible system behind their behaviors and inject some new stimulus into the system to make a change. More poignantly, anyone who cares to see it can watch manipulators (from salespersons to politicians and, unfortunately, sometimes even preachers) use psychological tools to motivate automatic behavior in unsuspecting clients or followers. Indeed, the herd mentality so disdained by philosophers like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche is a frightening and disappointing reality of humanity.

However, the lack of freedom’s exercise is in no way a proof or even evidence of its non-existence. When a person’s will injects creativity into the world that person is active. When, on the other hand, she flows along with the causal chain of events she is passive. Sadly, almost everyone—even this author—lives predominantly in passivity. Some probably spend their entire existence, with one notable exception, in passivity. While it is wise to acknowledge that people often are not aware of what they are doing or why they are doing it (think of the myriad unconscious motions with which everyone is constantly busy) it is both liberating (with the power to do differently) and encumbering (often with the responsibility to do differently) to realize that there is at each person’s disposal a tool for breaking free from many of the behaviors which appear to govern existence within the material world.

It is no wonder, by the way, that people do not appear to be free. Most do not (more…)

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Previous posts have explained why so many people find it difficult to believe in free will. Other prior posts explain that although it may be difficult, it is important to do so. This post continues that theme.
2.2.2 Real justice requires freedom regarding both behavior and character.
The fact that this moral problem for determinism (that determinism implies moral nihilism) is intrinsic to it is also evident from the nature of moral absolutes. If a person’s choices are determined then it becomes impossible to distinguish what is essential about that person’s identity from what is accidental. Either every accident would be a part of essence, or every presumed essence would actually be nothing more than an accident.
But in a world where every characteristic and behavior is necessary rather than (more…)

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This post concludes the first difficulty of denying the reality of free will. That first difficulty is that it underestimates the nature and power of God.
2.1.2.2 Even explaining God’s foreknowledge while accepting free will is too great a limit on God.
Using God’s foreknowledge of possibilities as a means of explaining freedom while maintaining God’s control of events misses the significance of freedom (Molinism’s failure regarding the significance of human freedom is not the point of this paper, but it can be mentioned briefly. Creating layers between God’s knowledge and the actions of his creatures in the future does not eliminate the apparent problem for freedom foreknowledge forces. That is, if God knowing the activity of a person means she does not have an option, then God knowing what she will do in every possible circumstance still does not leave her a genuine option since God knows which world [and therefore which circumstances] He will actualize. That is, God actualizing only the circumstances which will produce a certain choice makes her choice no freer than the compatiblist’s subject, although her determination is buried one layer deeper) and inappropriately attempts to explain the knowledge of God. The question is how God could (more…)

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2.1.2.1.3 The significance of contingency and revelation are directly proportional.
This post does not argue that revelation would have to be unimportant if determinism were true, but rather that the more likely indeterminacy and contingency are, the more fundamentally important special revelation is. It is a point which emerges from the freedom of God and leads then inevitably to the responsibility of people to respond to submit to the revelation.
The fact that the universe could be otherwise, its contingency, is what makes revelation so essential. There are a couple of different means by which humanity can discern truth: reason and revelation. By reason (which is really just an aspect of general revelation) people discern what is necessarily true. (At the conclusion of this post it is implicit that “necessarily” only means something is necessary subsequent to God’s choice to make it so.) But truth which cannot be known by reason alone—what is not necessarily so, but only contingently so—people can know only (more…)

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The closer an election, the greater the shallow promises intended to convince a few more voters toward one side or the other. Since by definition the majority of people are not wealthy, many of those shallow promises are aimed at the middle class and lower. “We will not raise taxes (or we will lower taxes) for anyone making less than $xxxx.” But promises are not the only way to win a middle-class heart. There are also attacks on a minority, in this case the wicked people who make more money than they do. “Greedy corporate executives have abused the free market and they ought to be punished.” Never mind that it is not greed, but the success at acting on their greed which actually aggravates the critic’s audience. That is, there is no political bounty to be had by attacking those who are greedy but fail to gain wealth through it: only those whose greed brings them wealth face the criticism, revealing the hypocrisy of a criticism motivated more by its disdain for wealth (or even profit) than for greed.
But back to the point: even a cursory analysis of those attacks extrudes (more…)

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This post continues the series begun here, the to-date-compilation of which is available here.
2.1.2.1.2 That God repents is evidence that God makes things the best, not that He must simply act within some externally defined best.
Even accepting the mistaken idea that there are a finite number of possibilities (too great a limit on God) there is still no reason to believe that there cannot be a plurality of morally equivalent possibilities. The scriptural use of “repentance” in reference to God makes the point. Reducing repentance to relenting neither addresses the problem nor deals fairly with the vocabulary—no one has a problem using the same word to mean repentance when it concerns humans. Is it not the case that every time God has mercy it is because He has repented? His pronouncement of judgment is not false. His mercy is real because the condemnation of the guilty is real and that guilty soul’s future without God is as really condemned as any future can be real. His act of mercy then overturns His pronouncement of judgment—which is why it is mercy. It is not necessity. If it were necessity, then His mercy (more…)

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Still on the second part of the overall journey engaged by this set of posts, this entry attempts to show why a sub-point of the claim that even God acts only within reason (rather than with radical freedom) results in a fallacious limitation of God’s sovereignty.
2.1.2.1.1 There is no reason to exclude contingency from descriptions of God.
As the previous post argues, there is no reason to believe God needed to choose between worlds, one of which was best or even better than the others.
But there is something else wrong with the assumption that this world is the best of all possible worlds. The rationalist’s question is why, if God knows everything about all possible worlds and has all power, it would not make sense to surmise that He has actualized the best of those worlds in submission (a term anathema to the supremacy of God) to reason. The question itself is misleading and overlooks something about what is possible to God.
There is an old paradox about (more…)

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Warning: this post contains dangerously opiatic speculation about truth and intelligence. It is an effort to clarify for myself what I see as a misguided feature of some hermeneutics, some apologetics, and much if not most skepticism. But it simply will not be interesting to people with real lives!
Intelligence can mean many different things: for example, the mental ability to comprehend things, the essential element of a purposive existence, and the ability to perform computer functions. This explanation uses the first definition, the mental ability to comprehend. So the level of intelligence refers to the capacity of a given person to comprehend something at a given time. The given time is important because it is beyond doubt that mental capacity is variable within a person over time. (For instance, the more a person memorizes, the greater becomes that person’s ability to memorize.)
Truth can also be defined many different ways, only one of which has any real meaning. So while authors can define truth as (more…)

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When Hurricanes strike, as Gustav is doing right now, age-old questions are raised again. Some are about how to react and why. But some are more basic, about the source of all kinds of problems persistently faced by man. This post is about that question: from where comes evil?
The first eight and a half lines of Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” describe the immediate source (or proximate cause, using Descartes’ language) of problems:

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it
And spills the (more…)

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