LOL! You’ve got to be kidding me.
Yes, but, I also say that
which means that there’s no special value or meaning derived from having an option which one knows is faulty. Thus, where*** is*** the real choice anyway?
That’s not LFW – is it?
TotalVictory
Bobx3
Aug: But seriously Tom, how is the virtue of choice in regards to love being possible not relevant? I’m confused there.
Tom: I must have missed something, because I do think choice in regards to love is relevant. I just don’t think ‘choice’ is a ‘virtue’.
Bob: 1) One man stated – as if he had summarized the entire debate: “God will not accept/be satisfied with the Love of a Robot!” (by which he must mean something like "”determined” love). And certainly I can appreciate that a fully determined love is fairly meaningless to God and therefore unacceptable.
Tom: Precisely. If I found out that my wife’s love for me has all these years been determined by some biochip in her brain by a will or wills other than her, by forces or persons other than her, my opinion and experience of HER (as friend, lover, partner, etc.) would drastically change. I would no longer be able to perceive her love for me as HER love for me.
I’ve tried to explain this existential angst away theologically and philosophically, but it just won’t budge. The more I live and relate and experience the more convinced I become that the metaphysics behind this experience (which as far as I can tell is universally shared, in spite of the fact that some hold to deterministic views that ought to alleviate the disappointment of such a discovery) is best expressed by the rule “love requires freedom.”
Bob: If this is true however, wouldn’t it be equally true that a determined rebellion (sin) against God is just as unacceptable?
Tom: Yes.
Bob: Scripture certainly seems to suggest that might be our plight when it speaks of us as sold under sin, as being born “in Adam” and as being “bound over into disobedience.” So through Christ it seems God has leveled the playing field as it were and thus refuses to allow us to be determined in sin forever.
Tom: I’m not following you. Are you saying the God’s ‘binding us all to disobedience so that he can have mercy on us all’ (Rm) means God determines all our sins so that God can have mercy on us all and determine all our good?
Bob: 2) Further, how could we possibly even know if our love was free or determined? I believe my wife’s love for me, and mine for her, is free (ie not determined)…
Tom: WHY do you believe it’s not determined? Obviously you believe as you do because of the difference that it makes. Most of us want a belief system that makes BEST sense of our experience of the world. And that’s what you’re doing. Now, sure, we all admit that we COULD be wrong about a lot of things, even this. That’s being intellectually honest and humble. If that’s all you mean by “we couldn’t possibly know if our love was free or determined” then I agree. But the same is true about nearly everything we believe, like “God exists.” I’m not saying “love requires freedom” is indisputable. I’m saying it’s the only way I know how to make sense of life and creaturely love. I’ve got zero experiential basis for making analogical sense of the claim that my love for God and others is determined utterly by forces and/or wills other than my own. So whether or not I can “know” that my love is determined by God, I do know this–viz., I can’t LIVE the belief that it is determined by God (and that in spite of the assurances of determinists that determinism really does provide a satisfying existential fit).
Bob: My point is that the idea that love must be free and undetermined is only measurable by, and meaningflu to God – not us.
Tom: I’m not sure about that. When you say above that you find robotic behavior (i.e., determined love) meaningless, you are in fact ‘measuring’ it by your own experience. You’re drawing upon your experience and a priori beliefs and intuitions to conclude that determined love doesn’t make sense. You measure it and find it doesn’t add up.
Bob: If He accepts it, we can be assured it is not the love of a robot He is accepting and therefore that it is free in meaningful ways.
Tom: Or rather that it IS the love of a robot and that therefore robotic love is meaningful and acceptable to God in spite of our presently thinking otherwise. I don’t think this, but it’s one of the options ONCE you take this route.
Bob: 3) It seems to me that in this whole drama of salvation – creation, fall, Cross, redemption, recreation etc – God is insistent on at least this: He accepts as “final” only those choices that are grounded in reality. It will not do to suggest that God must allow us our false perceptions, delusions, and psychoses forever.
Tom: Not ‘forever’, right.
Bob: For those are the forces which lend to our bondage, not our freedom. This insistence by God that our choice be based on reality (not delusions or falseness) is not a violation of our freedom at all, but rather an insistence on it. For this reason, in part, it seems unwarranted to define a “free” choice as one in which an alternate option could have been picked if that option were not rooted in reality and truth.
Tom: OK, I think I see what’s going on. But this gets us onto the much larger question of the ‘epistemic distance’ that LFW with respect to good/evil entails. Eve was capable of her choice to eat the fruit, right? That’s a capacity she possessed. Was this capacity rooted in reality? It sure was. God gave her this capacity. Was her capacity to misrelate to the facts rooted in reality? It was. Was her ability to misperceive her own identity and purpose within the world rooted in reality? Indeed it was. All these options were/are rooted in reality. That’s HOW it was even possible for her (and us) to sin. So GOD gives this capacity. God is the GROUND of all real (as opposed to imaginary) possibilities to sin. That might strike us as being mean or bad unless we can conceive of a purpose or reason that would justify God’s doing this, and that’s possible to do. One reason God would do so is because “creaturely love requires freedom” which in turn implies a certain risk of evil inherent in the project. God can’t get us into the perfected love he intends for us apart for giving us the space to become so, and that “space” is volitional space, it’s a measure of “say-so” by which our choices define the “I” who is a unique person-in-relation to God (and not just God expressing himself by means of us, which is what determinism gets you and why I think determinism logically reduces to pantheism).
But this rule (i.e., love requires freedom) obtains in the afterlife too. It can’t be avoided then just as it couldn’t be avoided in the garden. It just IS the mechanics by which created sentient being is perfected. Whatever might be the context and means by which souls are saved in the afterlife and their false perceptions slowly burnt away, an agent must remain relatively free in the libertarian sense on some significant level (and only God knows what’s minimally required) to determine him/herself with respect to God’s offer. That means saying “no” to God will always be an option (a REAL option) so long as one is this side of glorification.
Hope that helps clarify where I’m coming from.
Tom
Robotic behavior is purely based on a particular definition. “Super Toys last all summer long” (later becoming the motion picture A.I.) questions this by having “robots” mimic life so closely that it’s hard or indistinguishable to know if it’s a person or not. Surely even if a chip was programmed in a robot to love, I hardly think it would count to say it’s meaningless. Aaron’s point (as I understand it) is that randomness in LFW truly plays the part in this virture of love. In other words the chance that your wife may not love you is what makes her loving you feel better about her loving you. I’m not sold on that.
My daughter loves me and if God pulled a chip from her brain and told me “see, I did all this” I have two options, which I’m fairly sure you would choose the same as me:
a) throw the chip away and I could care less about this robot of a daughter.
b) put the chip back because I love her the way she is regardless if God causes her to love me or not.
I would clearly choose B - I don’t care if she’s programmed to love me, I just love her loving me whether it’s determined by the omnipotent being we call God, or not.
Also, wouldn’t choice be a virtue if it’s all important to the possibility of love? How could it not be? I guess that depends on how you define virtue.
And perhaps this raises another question. Does love give way to choice? Or does choice give way to love? - which comes first the chicken or the egg?
You go on a trip, intending to ultimately go to destination X. You look it up on Google, and believe you know the way, and so you take no maps or navigating intruments with you. Everything seems to be going fine until you arrive at an unexpected fork in the road. You know that either the left fork or the right fork leads to X. You must make a choice and hope for the best. There is no rational reason to choose one fork over another. Nevertheless, you make a choice.
Is this a libertarian free-will choice or has your choice been determined?
If your choice were determined, what factors in your character or past experiences could have determined it?
Aug: Robotic behavior is purely based on a particular definition. “Super Toys last all summer long” (later becoming the motion picture A.I.) questions this by having “robots” mimic life so closely that it’s hard or indistinguishable to know if it’s a person or not.
Tom: It may be difficult for us to determine whether something is or isn’t a robot. But what’s not difficult to determine is how we’d FEEL or react about discovering the truth that the people who love us are robots programmed to do what they do by forces and wills other than their own.
Aug: Surely even if a chip was programmed in a robot to love, I hardly think it would count to say it’s meaningless.
Tom: Right, it WOULD mean SOMETHING. It would mean that the person who has been loving me has been determined or programmed to do so. But it would be meaningless (well, to many of us) as an instantiation of the determined person’s personal identity and love.
Aug: Aaron’s point (as I understand it) is that randomness in LFW truly plays the part in this virtue of love. In other words the chance that your wife may not love you is what makes her loving you feel better about her loving you. I’m not sold on that.
Tom: Then I can’t begin to convince you otherwise, because if you’re fine with determinism on an existential level it’s impossible to dislodge it. Hehe.
I don’t concede the ‘random’ nature of libertarian choice, but that’s another debate. However, from my point of view it’s not the fact that my wife ‘could not’ love me that “makes” me feel better about her loving me. What makes me feel right about her loving me is knowing that it’s HER who is loving me. Libertarian choice is just a necessary by-product of this that comes in further down the line.
Aug: My daughter loves me and if God pulled a chip from her brain and told me “See, I did all this” I have two options, which I’m fairly sure you would choose the same as me: …
Tom: Well, let’s see…
Aug: …a) throw the chip away and I could care less about this robot of a daughter. b) put the chip back because I love her the way she is regardless if God causes her to love me or not.
Tom: Maybe this is where the difference is, Aug, because it comes in immediately, right up front. If God determined your daughter’s ‘love’ for you, then in my view you can’t say “My daughter loves me and if God…” since in my view it’s GOD loving you by means of your daughter who is just merely the instrumentation of God’s actions. That’s functionally equivalent to pantheism in my view.
Aug: I would clearly choose B.
Tom: I’d respond with an existential meltdown, for there is no way I’d be able to view my daughter in terms of the person and love I’ve know. I literally have no way to give meaning to her existence in interpersonal terms. Of course, knowing that what response I give to the options is JUST as determined as my daughter’s love would just intensify the meltdown. I’ve got no means by which to enter meaningfully into either option you offer.
Aug: Also, wouldn’t choice be a virtue if it’s all important to the possibility of love? How could it not be? I guess that depends on how you define virtue.
Tom: Well, it’s not “all”-important. It’s partly-important. But it’s not itself a virtue. But this takes us all the way back to our earlier debate about whether libertarians have reason for “boasting” of their salvation. I argued there is no such basis for boasting.
Love it,
Tom
Hi Paidion,
Paidion: You go on a trip, intending to ultimately go to destination X. You look it up on Google, and believe you know the way, and so you take no maps or navigating intruments with you. Everything seems to be going fine until you arrive at an unexpected fork in the road. You know that either the left fork or the right fork leads to X. You must make a choice and hope for the best. There is no rational reason to choose one fork over another. Nevertheless, you make a choice. Is this a libertarian free-will choice or has your choice been determined?
Tom: Well, there’s no way to know from the circumstances you mention whether one is determined or not. The most one could argue from this much is that deliberation per se assumes the existence of genuine alternatives. One BELIEVES both options are equally open, and so one deliberates.
Paidion: If your choice were determined, what factors in your character or past experiences could have determined it?
Tom: Ask a determinist!
Tom
Hi Tom:
What I’m trying to do is figure this question:
My friends hold to a definition of love that you do as well – love, if free, must have the option to do otherwise. For these men, this means that, sad as it may be, some will take the option of annihilation. Yet you hold that all will be saved. Why is that? They feel that this definition of love logically and necessarily means the other option (annihilation) must be a live one; that is, it must actually be “chose-able” - to coin a word.
So how do you take the path you do? As I see it your options include:
- saying that God has predicted all will be saved because He knows what will actually happen. (that seems unlikely for you since you’re an open theist)…
- We can say that the choice of annihilation (or ect) is real but it’s not an actual possibility so we only deal with it in hypothetical terms…
- God is simply, as a matter of fact, better at effectively convincing us what’s best for us than we are at rejecting Him forever…
- You could say that ect/annihilation are merely imaginary constructs to describe a painful process of learning that God is who He has said He is (ie loving, having our best interest at heart, etc etc)
Tom: Precisely. If I found out that my wife’s love for me has all these years been determined by some biochip in her brain by a will or wills other than her, by forces or persons other than her, my opinion and experience of HER (as friend, lover, partner, etc.) would drastically change. I would no longer be able to perceive her love for me as HER love for me.
Bob: Yes: that seems the way of things to me as well… we both instinctively know that the chip is not really HER. (underlining the personal nature of all this…) And also, I am entirely puzzled why some (eg auggy) have no trouble with the chip…
Tom: I’m not following you. Are you saying the God’s ‘binding us all to disobedience so that he can have mercy on us all’ (Rom 11) means God determines all our sins so that God can have mercy on us all and determine all our good?
Bob: Well if we are trying to make our case strictly from the bible, it seems that the determinist’s case is much easier to make that’s all. Think about Paul’s potter and clay analogies… And what does it mean to be born “in Adam” unless to be born with a sinful nature? That hints strongly at determinism doesn’t it?
Tom: WHY do you believe it’s not determined? Obviously you believe as you do because of the difference that it makes. Most of us want a belief system that makes BEST sense of our experience of the world. And that’s what you’re doing.
Bob: Yes, I’ve agreed that it makes a difference but in fact I have no real way of knowing if it’s not an illusion; albeit a very crucial and necessary one which I’m willing to accept if I must. But since I can’t know this for sure, I’m not sure why an entire theory must hang on this one aspect? (LFW) I’m fine with assuming it’s there and leaving it at that. (that is, assuming the chip does not exist…) I think we’re both aware that some philosophers do hold that free will is an illusion but it’s such an important one for the way we order our societies that we must embrace it…
So again, I think it’s safe, maybe even crucial, to assume that God cannot accept the love of a robot, therefore since he accepts our love, it must not be that of a robot. That’s about all we can say about this it seems to me…
Tom: OK, I think I see what’s going on. But this gets us onto the much larger question of the ‘epistemic distance’ that LFW with respect to good/evil entails. Eve was capable of her choice to eat the fruit, right? That’s a capacity she possessed. Was this capacity rooted in reality? It sure was.
Bob: I’m thinking of this a bit differently Tom. When I say God insists our choices must be grounded in reality I’m not denying the reality that Eve made them or that she could make them. I’m saying that the reality was that God IS trustworthy and has her best interest at heart yet her choice was NOT grounded in that reality. She made a choice based on the false realities of her mind. I don’t see God as obligated in any way (unless temporarily only for learning/teaching purposes) to accept such a choice.
Maybe you’re agreeing with me on this…
Tom: Hope that helps clarify where I’m coming from.
Bob: Closer yes, but it still doesn’t explain why ect/annihilation is not a live, real option forever. How do you get from Yes, love, to be free, must have the alternate option to Yes all those choices were free and all were made in the correct way. If this is so, how can you be sure the alternate really was an option in the first place? My free will insisting friends say that our character IS formed by the cumulation of all the free choices that went before and that this eventually becomes irreversible. Yet you say just the opposite. So if those choices and bad character are not allowed to stand, how can we say those choices were in fact “real”??
Which leads to my above questions again!
And a PS here — I’m very tempted to believe that the so called “option” to leave God forever is in fact not a real one at all and never was! I may sit down to dinner and imagine eating a steak but if that’s not even on the menu, it never was a real option. Maybe ect/annihilation never was on the menu! Which seems to me like a huge problem for LFW and it makes it understandable why my friends believe annihilation must exist. Because that’s the only way LFW exists!
Hmmmm
TotalVictory
Bobx3
Tom,
You’re right we def. are from different spheres on this issue. Not only would I not throw the chip away, I would protect it with my own life. I love my daughter and that is what helps me to understand that if God causing us to love him is something that is certain to happen (determined) and it means something to God, then that is something I can live with. What I can’t see is how it’s not certain to happen when he says it is and yet is without failure; but that’s another debate (OVT).
But still (though it touches on the OVT debate) I can’t help but ask Tom, what is the difference in a robot who is programmed to love someone and a free creature who is caused to love someone? If you say the free creature is not caused (by God) then how do you account for the plethora of passages which speak about God causing things – such as Jeremiah “I will put my spirit in you and cause you to walk in my ways”. My point is that neither direct determinism (God programming us like robots) nor indirect determinism (God controls us so much that our choices end up in his prognostication) are compatible with this randomness that Aaron raises. Even if a person is free, how could it be if free from God’s prediction?
Paidion,
Do I understand correctly, the thrust of your point to be that the one who lacks knowledge and thus guesses cannot do so from a determined paradigm? For nothing in our past could provide a reason to make a choice. And thus a free guess (choice) must be made? Or better said - how does a determinist account for a random choice?
I’ve never thought of it but give me some time to crunch it a bit. Perhaps Aaron has some insight……by the way where is that guy!!!
Paidion: If your choice were determined, what factors in your character or past experiences could have determined it?
Tom: Ask a determinist!
Paidion: That’s what I was trying to do! There seems to be two or three of them posting in this thread.
Bob: My friends hold to a definition of love that you do as well – love, if free, must have the option to do otherwise. For these men, this means that, sad as it may be, some will take the option of annihilation. Yet you hold that all will be saved. Why is that? So how do you take the path you do? As I see it your options include:
- saying that God has predicted all will be saved because He knows what will actually happen. (that seems unlikely for you since you’re an open theist)…
- We can say that the choice of annihilation (or ect) is real but it’s not an actual possibility so we only deal with it in hypothetical terms…
- God is simply, as a matter of fact, better at effectively convincing us what’s best for us than we are at rejecting Him forever…
- You could say that ect/annihilation are merely imaginary constructs to describe a painful process of learning that God is who He has said He is (ie loving, having our best interest at heart, etc etc).
Tom: Thanks for the great questions, Bob (and Auggy too!).
I’ve never heard of (4) and wouldn’t go that route, and (2) doesn’t strike me as plausible either. So that leaves (1) and (3). I think I’d combine these with a few qualifications.
In my view the only way I can consider annihilationism is if it’s possible for a human being to self-dispose irrevocably into evil, that is, to become so solidified or habituated in sin through the misuse of freedom that one becomes compatibilistically fixed in an evil disposition in all conceivable situations. In THAT case there truly is no hope and the person is literally irredeemable. In such cases I believe the loving thing to do is to annihilate such persons.
But I don’t believe such irrevocable solidification into evil is metaphysically possible. It’s a drawn out explanation, but the short version is that God, as the ground and sustainer of all that exists, is always part of the *possibilities of becoming *for anything that exists. In other words, to exist is to be loved and sustained by God, and that means that all that God is constitutes the GROUND of one’s being. This is hardly grounds for hopelessness. And this in turn means there is always the possibility of Godward movement, however small and on whatever level, for all of us. Absolute hopelessness is, in my view, a metaphysical impossibility. And since there is therefore always some possibility of Godward movement that constitutes the ground of our being, our dispositions can never be irrevocably fixed in evil. We cannot self-dispose out of the possibilities introduced to/for us by the very ground of our existing at all. To exist IS to be invited by God to move in his direction. There’s no way I see for an existing sentient being to dispose out of THAT. So annihilationism is out because God would never exterminate what is redeemable.
St. Maximus describes this in terms of the logoi of created beings. Our logoi are the uncreated energies of God that constitute the ground of our being/existence, and they define the aims/goals of our being. They describe the fulfilled and perfected YOU as God intends you to be. And they are indestructible because they are divine intentions or divine subjective aims for created entities. They are essentially GOD standing in me, sustaining my existence and saying, “Be THIS…”
(Digression: But we want to avoid pantheism. So the only way our logoi can be instantiated concretely (as opposed to being abstract intentions of God for us) is if they’re instantiated in us as non-divine beings, and the only way they can be instantiated in us as non-divine is if they are instantiated AS us, i.e., as we freely embrace our logos and self-dispose toward it. That exercise of freedom is what distinguishes us as ‘created’ over and against our logoi as ‘uncreated’ and divine. But if God determines it in every respect, then there’s no real distinction between created and uncreated being. Creating being becomes merely God, AS God, acting ad extra.)
This is, by the way, partly how Gregory of Nyssa argued his universalism so far as I understand. He believed all sentient beings will eventually return to God; all logoi return to the Logos, for the are by definition IN the Logos. But he never suggested a terminus ad quem at which time God steps in and unilaterally determines a person’s conformity to their logos. He expresses the hope and confidence THAT it will happen without suggesting any kind of timetable.
Sorry if I’ve created more questions than I’ve answered! 
But I also believe that LFW is a necessary feature of creaturely movement toward and into salvation. So I can’t believe in a version of UR that has God drawing a line in the sand at some point and saying to those in hell, “Enough is enough. I’m saving you butt now, caboom!” That’s determinism. And I also can’t suppose that God so constrains a person’s context by removing all ‘epistemic distance’ that he essentially makes it impossible for him/her to say “no” to God. So what I’m left with is an open-ended eschatology that combines (1) and (3). God loves us enough to never give up on us. He’ll pursue us as long as it takes. He’s got eternity, right? And remember, it’s not possible to reject God forever since the future can never be traversed. One can never succeed in exhausting all the future there is and so end up rejecting God “finally.” All one can do is continue to reject God for the moment. But LFW doesn’t obligate God to allows us to reject him once and for all irrevocably. All LFW means is that right now, with THIS choice, THIS moment, I can respond positively to God or not.
Technically this means I’m not a universalist I suppose, because I don’t posit a terminus ad quem at which point God decides to just save us in compatibilistic fashion. But I do reject ECT and annihilationism. Those are definitely off the table. The fires of hell do burn away the chaff and all our false selves. But that in itself doesn’t make choosing rightly an inevitability. Adam and Eve had no old man to deal with, no history of false selves and warped perceptions, no ingrained sin, and no fallen systems or sinful societal influences…and they were still free to say no to God.
Hope that helps.
Tom
Aug: Not only would I not throw the chip away, I would protect it with my own life. I love my daughter…
Tom: Well, technically, on your view God is loving your daughter (not you) and by means OF you. But you find that meaningful, so it’s OK.
Aug: …and that is what helps me to understand that if God causing us to love him is something that is certain to happen (determined) and it means something to God, then that is something I can live with.
Tom: What’s it mean to God to be loved by individuals whose love and worship of him are utterly and efficaciously determined BY him? I’m not saying such determinism has absolutely no meaning to God. It at least means that he’s determining these creatures to act as they do, and that’s something. But what do you think it means in terms of loving interpersonal relations?
Let’s say you’d like for your small daughter to draw you a pretty picture. You say, “Draw me a pretty Spring day, Hunny!” Then YOU pick the colors and paper, YOU outline the composition, YOU grab her hands in yours and direct her every movement. YOU end up composing the picture through her. She’s merely the ‘means’ of your own determinate self-expression.
Now, you find this a meaningful way of interpersonal way of relating. I don’t. So help me out. Tell me what meaning you find in the two scenarios. Scenario 1 as described above, where you do all the determining. Scenario 2 is what every father I’ve ever meant would say to his daughter, “Hunny, I want YOU to make something up for me. YOU color me something!” and the father does NOT want to determine the daughter’s every movement precisely because he wants the composition to be a work of art that SHE creates. Now, I find the difference between these substantial. I think most people immediate perceive the difference and would value the latter where the purpose is the enjoyment of interpersonal loving relations.
So what’s the difference to you, Auggy, in meaning between S1 and S2? What would your daughter’s action in each MEAN to you in S1 versus S2? If God’s doing the determining, you said you find NO difference. I’m taking you at your word, but I have to admit that I can’t fathom a loving father not finding that the difference between these two when it comes to loving, personal relations is radical and that S2 is viewed as personal and MUTUALLY loving whereas S1 doesn’t even fall into the same category.
Aug: But still (though it touches on the OVT debate) I can’t help but ask Tom, what is the difference in a robot who is programmed to love someone and a free creature who is caused [by forces or wills other than the person (Tom’s clarification)] to love someone?
Tom: Nothing. There’s nothing essentially different between the two that I can see. Sure, the robot is not animated life in the biological sense. But that’s just hardware. Both are determined in all their movements and actions by forces/wills other than their own.
Aug: If you say the free creature is not caused (by God) then how do you account for the plethora of passages which speak about God causing things – such as Jeremiah “I will put my spirit in you and cause you to walk in my ways”.
Tom: We can have the OVT conversation someday. It’s not so relevant to UR, but it would be fun!
Tom
Well Tom, you really do have a beautiful way with words and indeed I AM helped by this response!
You say, however, that you’ve
(where 4) You could say that ect/annihilation are merely imaginary constructs to describe a painful process of learning that God is who He has said He is (ie loving, having our best interest at heart, etc etc).
and 2) We can say that the choice of annihilation (or ect) is real but it’s not an actual possibility so we only deal with it in hypothetical terms…)
and yet you say that
and
which don’t seem too far away at all from #4 and #2 to me!
Which makes this all the more beautiful to me:
Not sure at all my friends will “buy” this, so I will have to work on my salesmanship! But more, I think that the idea that real freedom requires being informed, un-determined, and rational, (per Tom Talbott) is also huge. To choose ect/annihilation can’t be informed, or rational, therefore God will not accept that “choice”….
TotalVictory
Bobx3
The problem with such analogies is that the daughter is not independent of God. In other words, it was I who taught my daughter how to paint, and thus she paints just like me. If she paints something I don’t like (sin) then I punish her until she produces the painting I prefer - one I would or could do myself - in other words until she bears my image (paints just like me).
So I see the end result the same that is, we end up exactly where he wants us on the chart according to the timeline he drew out.
Now perhaps this is a poor route to take and I suspect that I’ll get nuked (even by Aaron) regarding this. But we humans have a thing for sentimentality. We can own a car for years and even gain to love that car though that car has NO free will on it’s own and that car does nothing to return love to us. I was reading C.S. Lewis’ The Problem of Pain, there he raises the issue of us loving dogs who in turn don’t choose to love back. I realize C.S. Lewis was no determinist.
Though I surely have a sympathy what what you say Tom, I cannot bring myself to believe that if God pulled a chip from your wife you would abandon your love for her. For all you experiences are with the person (though determined) whom that chip belongs. And thus I believe you, like me, would desire her to continue as God made her (determined or not) that you could continue to experience her loving you (even if you don’t call that love). Sure you views of hwo things work would be shattered, but I hardly think that all your love would shatter - Love is much stronger than that if you truly love her. I know, if I found my daughter was a robot, I would love her still. Sure I would be rattled at how things work and wonder how it could be, but I would still love her. If God can make robots who are so lifelike and real then what’s to keep someone from loving them - Ahhhh Blade Runner.
Aug: Though I surely have a sympathy what what you say Tom, I cannot bring myself to believe that if God pulled a chip from your wife you would abandon your love for her…
Tom: True, I would have a difficult time not valuing her the same and feeling the same for her as I have, especially after all our history.
BUT, what WOULD happen is that I’d no longer be able to view HER love FOR ME in the same terms. I’d know that GOD was the ‘person’ loving me and doing all these things for me, not my wife, whom I would no longer be able to view in mutually personal terms. Eventually my emotions for her would change to match the truth I had come to discover about God’s determining her.
Tom
Bob: You say, however, that you’ve “never heard of (4) and wouldn’t go that route, and (2) doesn’t strike me as plausible either” (where 4) You could say that ect/annihilation are merely imaginary constructs to describe a painful process of learning that God is who He has said He is (ie loving, having our best interest at heart, etc etc).
Tom: You mean admit that ECT or annihilation are taught in Scripture but that they’re intended to only offer an imaginary and dramatic portrayal of intense suffer which is in actuality not everlasting (as with ECT) and which does not end in our annihilation (as with annihilationism)? That seems a bit of a stretch.
Bob: and 2) We can say that the choice of annihilation (or ect) is real but it’s not an actual possibility so we only deal with it in hypothetical terms…)
Tom: I’m not sure how that actually works out when you suggest that the biblical author is in on it. How do you establish that this is what the author is up to from the text? It seems better to just establish what sort of suffering the text is actually describing and then hold that to be in fact the true the Scriptural position.
So I don’t deal with either ECT or annihilationism in hypothetical terms. I don’t think either is actually taught in Scripture, in which case there’s no need to deal with them as imaginary concepts or what have you. They’re just false claims.
Bob: and yet you say that “I don’t believe such irrevocable solidification into evil is metaphysically possible” and “absolute hopelessness is, in my view, a metaphysical impossibility.” which don’t seem too far away at all from #4 and #2 to me!
Tom: Well, a proponent of 4 and 2 would agree with me that there is no truly hopeless state. But 4 and 2 say other things that make them implausible to me. I mean, they may get to “no hopelessness exists” but they get there through a route I wouldn’t take.
Bob: Which makes this all the more beautiful to me: “And remember, it’s not possible to reject God forever since the future can never be traversed. One can never succeed in exhausting all the future there is and so end up rejecting God ‘finally’. All one can do is continue to reject God for the moment.”
Tom: Exactly!
Bob: Not sure at all my friends will “buy” this, so I will have to work on my salesmanship! But more, I think that the idea that real freedom requires being informed, un-determined, and rational, (per Tom Talbott) is also huge.
Tom: I didn’t know TomT was a libertarian when it comes to freedom. I thought he was a determinist. But that’s good news!
But the fact that a person cannot finally exhaust all there is to the future is pretty obvious. However long you exist (in hell OR heaven) there will always be an incalculable eternity before you that you’ve yet to encounter. It’s unending, so you can never succeed in “finally” rejecting God.
Tom
Tom: Let’s say you’d like for your small daughter to draw you a pretty picture. You say, “Draw me a pretty Spring day, Hunny!” Then YOU pick the colors and paper, YOU outline the composition, YOU grab her hands in yours and direct her every movement. YOU end up composing the picture through her. She’s merely the ‘means’ of your own determinate self-expression.
Aug: The problem with such analogies is that the daughter is not independent of God. In other words, it was I who taught my daughter how to paint, and thus she paints just like me. If she paints something I don’t like (sin) then I punish her until she produces the painting I prefer - one I would or could do myself - in other words until she bears my image (paints just like me).
Tom: I don’t see the problem that’s caused here by the supposed dependence upon God. It’s still the case that as dependent (in the deterministic sense) upon God, all your daughter does is precisely what God determines her to do. This is analogous to your determining all your daughter does in the scenario I offer. You pick the colors, medium, composition, and then, holding her hands in yours, you guide all her movements so that she composes and paints exactly what YOU decide.
I’m really interested in know what the difference would be to you in S1 and S2. If you don’t want to link it to theology, fine. Just tell me, off the record so to speak. If your daughter comes to you with a pretty picture and says, “Daddy, I made up a picture for you and painted it to say how much I love you!” how would you feel about the picture as an expression of HER love for you IF you knew that I had chosen colors, medium, and I held her hands in mine and moved them to compose exactly what “I” wanted.
God aside, how would you then feel about the picture your daughter handed you, knowing that she contributed nothing of her own creative self-expression and that I in fact did it all through her sheer instrumentality? Come on. Would you REALLY feel no differently about this than you would feel about her having painted it on her own?
Tom
TGB, for sure. But the problem is God is behind everything. From our very breaths, to the meetings we encounter. The humor we write, the sun which bathes us with it’s warmth, even to the stories we tell. So if I disconnect the source (life) from the subject then yes, a mannequin (spelling) would not do for certain.
But if that mannequin should do something by which God is the source of that, I have no difficulty believing that I could still love my daughters painting. In other words, if God places a love in her heart which she did not muster upon her own self, I could accpet that love where you cannot. For if God placed a love in her heart for you, you have to reject it because, well it’s not your daughter loving you.
You see the point is that no matter how many colors you want her to choose, you (God) will not accept it until it’s the colors he desires (his will). Once his will is met, then the painting is EXACTLY how he would paint it. Sure hard determinism is not needed to prove this, but soft determinism is certainly creeping at the door.
Now do you really expect me to believe that after all your lifes experiences that if God pulled a chip from you wife, you would not love her (that is the robot who operates with that chip). In some ways I think this only begs the question because we may be defining (chip) in different ways. But as I said, I expect you’d recall all your memories and love them all the same. I hardly doubt you would think “oh now I realize it was a waste of time, give me flesh not silicone”.
Aug
Bob,
I wanted to try to tie up a few lose ends before we sign off.
Bob: When I say God insists our choices must be grounded in reality I’m not denying the reality that Eve made them or that she could make them. I’m saying that the reality was that God IS trustworthy and has her best interest at heart yet her choice was NOT grounded in that reality. She made a choice based on the false realities of her mind. I don’t see God as obligated in any way (unless temporarily only for learning/teaching purposes) to accept such a choice. Maybe you’re agreeing with me on this…
Tom: I am agreeing, yes. But let me try to get a bit clearer on it by just thinking out loud here for a moment. As I see it, God accepts all our choices. Of course, he holds us accountable as well. But he at least gives us space to choose, even choose wrongly. But in order to hold me accountable for the sinful choices I make, those choices have to be (minimally) rational.
So far so good. But we now are left having to explain choices which are BOTH ‘rational’ and ‘sinful’ AND which God accepts (i.e., which God lets us make). If love requires freedom (to make these kinds of choices) then God must endow us with enough epistemic wherewithal to rationally make both kinds of choices. If God removes ALL epistemic distance (that is, all our ability to rationalize our way through to bad choices is removed such that we can form no false view of ourselves and the world), then rejecting love can’t be rational and we can’t be held accountable for doing so. So it seems to me that the ‘space’ God gives us to choose and self-determine is (among other things) ‘epistemic space’, i.e., we’re given enough info to make choosing the good as well as the wrong both real possibilities. Like you said: “…unless temporarily only for learning purposes.” But this ‘temporary’ is just the point. It’s exactly what I understand the entire human journey PRIOR to our glorification to be. We’re learning, growing, maturing, etc., up until the time we are perfected and glorified.
Bob: Closer yes, but it still doesn’t explain why ect/annihilation is not a live, real option forever. How do you get from ‘Yes, love, to be free, must have the alternate option’ to ‘Yes all those choices were free and all were made in the correct way’. If this is so, how can you be sure the alternate really was an option in the first place?
Tom: I’m confident the option was a genuine option because of a) the accountability God says I must give of the choices I make entails such options, and b) the existential impossibility of rationally deliberating while believing there are no options…(those two reasons come to mind).
Bob: My free will insisting friends say that our character IS formed by the cumulation of all the free choices that went before and that this eventually becomes irreversible. Yet you say just the opposite.
Tom: Believing that’s it becomes irreversible is the standard LFW take on character solidification. But I guarantee you no LFWer speaks from experience. I mean, none can say that KNOW they’ve met someone who has solidified irreversibly into evil. But the point is that LFW per se doesn’t entail this view of solidification.
But to clarify. I don’t exactly say the opposite, for I do indeed think that we can and will eventually solidify irreversibly into love/good. That’s our nature and the nature of the divine ground that sustains us. What I deny is that we can solidify irreversibly into evil. Solidification is not symmetrical. This is the thing. MOST LFWers would disagree with me and say it is symmetrical. And it would have to be in order for annihilationism to be possible. But for the reasons I shared already, I don’t think irreversible solidification of the will into evil is metaphysically possible. So I think solidification is ‘asymmetrical’. You can irreversibly habituate into the good (because existence per se IS the good), but you can’t irreversibly habituate into evil (because evil is privation OF the good). No sentient being that exists can foreclose all possibility of Godward movement. It doesn’t lie within the scope of our natural capacities. And this, again, is how I understand Gregory of Nyssa et. al.
Bob: So if those choices and bad character are not allowed to stand, how can we say those choices were in fact “real”?
Tom: Any choice that we CAN rationally and freely make will be allowed to stand. Can we rationally and freely choose irrevocably to self-destruct by either choosing ECT or annihilation? No. That’s not sufficiently rational. God doesn’t have to honor that (but it’s not possible anyhow, so…). But neither can God collapse the epistemic distance to zero so that we’re so flooded with light and truth and we’ve no rational way of saying “no” to God.
Bob: I’m very tempted to believe that the so called “option” to leave God forever is in fact not a real one at all and never was!
Tom: I agree. It’s not a real option. We may THINK it is, but we can never DISCOVER that it is. We can only discover that however far we have run, we have run “in” God and have failed to escape him. And God is under no obligation set on him by LFW to give annihilation or irrevocable separation to those who THINK that’s what they really want…
…but neither will he give heaven (i.e., himself) to those who don’t freely cry out for it.
Bob: I may sit down to dinner and imagine eating a steak but if that’s not even on the menu, it never was a real option. Maybe ect/annihilation never was on the menu! Which seems to me like a huge problem for LFW and it makes it understandable why my friends believe annihilation must exist.
Tom: They never were on the menu, and the reason is that God is a God of infinite and unconditional love. But we don’t need them to make sense of LFW. And determinism is also not on the menu because ‘love requires freedom’.
Tom
2 questions: one for Aaron and one for Tom
Have been mulling all this over in my mind and have been a bit “distracted” this past week. But I’ve got a couple questions…
… Aaron: This thread was originally started by you, yet I’m unclear how you’ve processed these ideas Tom has talked about. I’m really curious to know if the discussion satisfies your question, makes things murkier, or if you’re still pondering it, or if it all seems impossible to resolve!
No pressure, just curious as I really like to see/read how your mind digests matters like this…
… Tom: I’m under the impression (perhaps mistaken??) that you align closely with Greg Boyd on this matter of LFW and it further seems clear to me that you both have a very keen concept of God’s nature of love and His desire to save all. Yet you embrace UR and Greg has not. (At least publicly) Would you be willing to speculate and diagnose where and why you two part ways on this??
TotalVictory
Bobx3