The Evangelical Universalist Forum

Free Will and Boasting

Theology Philosophical
#101

It’s late and my thoughts are probably garbled.

Bob: Why couldn’t one agree that God freely loves us and insures our worth, but think that making better choices is a cogent way of determining who among the valued has displayed superiority?

Tom: Superior in what sense? We’ve been discussing ‘boasting’, so I’m guessing you mean demonstrating a superior worth or value over unbelievers. But one could not ‘think that making better choices is a cogent way of determining that one was of superior worth or value compared to others’ and also ‘agree that God’s unconditional love insures everybody’s worth unconditionally’. No one can grasp the meaning of these two beliefs and assert them both. To do what you’re suggestiong, one would have to posit his ‘superiority’ outside God’s unconditional love (as your question supposes), and that would mean denying that one’s worth and value are grounded unconditionally in God (which your question assumes).

Bob: The only counter argument I’m hearing is (1) FLW would be most coherent with God having “libertarian freedom.” And you seem to argue, if God didn’t ‘need’ to create, the creation must have been his LFW choice.

Tom: I thought you agreed that God’s choice to create was free in this sense. But I’m not sure what I’m countering here. I thought the gist of this thread was whether or not LFW encouraged boasting. That’s what I’ve tried to focus on. I haven’t been especially trying to argue that we do in fact have LFW. And I agreed with you that God’s being libertarianly free in creating us doesn’t necessarily mean he created us libertarianly free. He might have libertarianly chosen to determine everything about us! All I was arguing from God’s being libertarianly free is the possibility and meaningfulness of that sort of freedom.

Bob: But instead of evaluating how life functions by looking at evidence on that, aren’t you basing it on something even more impenetrable: my grasp of how ‘God’ functions? How would I know what it means for God to ‘need’ or not need to do something, or what definition of FLW fits God?

Tom: Should we banish ourselves to pure agnosticism and scepticism and resign ourselves to saying nothing with confidence about God or his relationship to the world? This is a much larger issue—the whole question of just how our language applies to God. Deep waters. And I’m a fan of Eastern apophaticism! I agree there is a sense in which all our God-talk is tentative and qualified by our finitude in the sense that it can never absolutely capture God or reduce him to our concepts. God will always escape our language, yes. But that goes for the determinist too—for his understanding of ‘sovereignty’ and ‘providence’ and ‘glory’ and ‘power’ and all the other core concepts and intuitions that drive determinists and their worldview.

But surely our being created in God’s image and the realism of the God-world relationship grounds our confidence in speaking of God (as loving, or thinking, or choosing, etc.). God isn’t just another human being who loves and thinks and chooses. I grant that. But neither is the gulf (to disagree with Keikegaard!) “infinite and qualitative” so that we can never expect our concepts to touch the reality that God is.

But even IF we qualify all our claims about God so that we agree God doesn’t think or act or choose in exactly the ways we humans think and act and choose, all a proponent of LFW needs to link his sense of choice with the sense in which God is supposed to be free in creating is what any other determinist (or any other believer for that matter) needs when he denies that God has such and such a freedom and makes his own positive statements about God (e.g., God ‘determines’ all things). I mean, if we have no grounds for saying anything meaningful and confident about God regarding his freedom (because we don’t know how God functions), why should we think we know enough to say that God ‘determines’ all things, or that God is ‘sovereign’, or even that he ‘loves’ in the sense we humans employ these terms?

Bob: (2) You say if God has FLW, then it is metaphysically coherent that we could have it. But how would I know that what is created can be whatever God is? Maybe Creator and creature are of a quite different order.

Tom: I agree. But they’re not so different that the creature cannot bear the image of the creator, or that the creator cannot incarnate and assume created nature to his own person, or that the two cannot share a true and personal intimacy of love. So that encourages our theologizing—whatever school we come from. If these relations between God and us are genuine (and we agree they are), it only means that human beings can be SOME of what God is (not “whatever” God is). I mean, when we love are we more or less like God? How can we say ‘more like God’ unless we believe our concepts (of love, justice, goodness) really do convey truth about both sides of the divine-human relation? Once we grant that our concepts are sufficient to mediate truth about God, and to express the reality of experiencing God, and sufficient to serve as a vehicle for divine revelation—how do exclude talk of ‘freedom’ from all this?

I was just focusing on the argument against LFW based on the claim that what it supposes is in fact meaningless, that no such freedom is possible, and that it reduces to sheer randomness. But the same reason that makes these claims is the reason that makes claims about God (that he determines all things, that he loves, that he’s just, kind, good, etc.). So how can we employ our reason in arguing these attributes about God (and be right) and then disqualify this same reason when somebody uses it to argue that God is something we think God is not?

Back to boasting…

If anyone meets a believer who genuinely feels he has superior value as a human being over unbelievers, tell them to email me. I think I can show them pretty easily (if they’re at all teachable) how illegitimate and arrogant such an attitude is. It won’t take long to get them to see how such boasting is a fundamental denial of their identity and unconditional value in Christ and how affirming the infinite value of even the worst sinner is more invigorating and satisfying and fulfilling than is supposing they possess a value superior to sinners simply because they ‘freely’ said yes to God.

Nite nite!
Tom

#102

Auggy: So I don’t know or claim anything except what seems logical to human reason.

Tom: Me too!

Auggy: Bob’s question makes sense to me. Like I said, I still don’t see that pointing the finger at Determinism gets LFW off the hook.

Tom: My point is that given the terms of your accusation about LFW, both determinism and libertarianism are on the same hook, if by hook we mean that both believers in determinism and believers in LFW can mistake their views for reasons to boast. You don’t see or agree this is the case, so we can leave it there I guess, but I’m not pointing a finger at determinism to get LFW off the hook per se. I don’t need determinism to be this or that or anything else to show that LFW doesn’t entail a justification for boasting. My point in turning the accusation against LFW back toward determinism was just to show how the accusation (so far as it went) implicated determinism as well.

Auggy: I do still see that LFW (Arminian) inherits the weakness - which I don’t think you’re disagreeing –

Tom: But I am disagreeing. I don’t think LFW inherits a weakness in the sense you mean.

Auggy: …and is magnified by the fact that they hold an inconsistent view of unconditional love.

Tom: Again, not exactly. Failing to understand that one’s worth is grounded in God’s unconditional love doesn’t “magnify an inherent weakness” of LFW…any more than failing to understand the unconditional nature of election magnify the inherent weakness of determinism.

Auggy: Where Calvinism’s determinism has built in defense mechanism from such a defect.

Tom: Yes, of course your SYSTEM has a built in defense mechanism. My SYSTEM has one too. So we’re even.

Auggy: I don’t know that I can understand anything else because it’s so freaking deep that my eye balls bleed.

Tom: Can we get a new smily face over on the right that has bleeding eyes? I know how you feel!

Auggy: One last note I’ll ask you to comment on is my response to the libertarian charge: If determinism makes God the author of sin then LFW makes sinners the author of righteousness.

Tom: The short reply would be to say that the determining going on in God’s case and ours is not sufficiently similar to make your response work. That is, each is not quite set within identical contexts. The determination of the divine decree is specifically unconditional. The self-determination of human beings is entirely conditional. That is, when God decrees all the sin the world’s sad history has known (so the theory goes), God doesn’t previously require anything from the world or have to condition his decree upon anything outside himself or acknowledge anything but his own will. The decree isn’t grounded in anything but God’s will uninfluence and uninformed by anything outside God.

But when we freely determine ourselves the is very different. Our determining ourselves requires much! That is, the exercise of human freedom is ‘conditional’ upon much outside ourselves. That’s it’s even possible is grounded in God’s gracious offer. When we choose, we do so “in response to” that offer, AND the power to freely self-determine is itself a gift of God, AND the exercise of it is sustained and upheld by God’s covenant with creation for the sole purpose of bringing us into loving fellowship with God.

This is the whole asymmetry of the creator-created distinction I mentioned. The distinction means that one can explain the unconditional divine decree to instantiate evil (assuming that’s the view we’re considering) by appealing to nothing whatsoever outside of God. That’s Calvin’s decree. But one cannot explain the conditional exercise of human free will by appealing only to the agents themselves (paralleling the divine determination). On the contrary, we MUST go outside ourselves to account for the exercise of our free will, and in so doing we acknowledge God at every step as having first ‘given’ and then as ‘sustaining’ and then as ‘inviting’ and then as ‘rewarding’. But to acknowledge God ‘at every step’ in this way is to kiss good-bye all grounds for boasting because recognizing these specific dependencies (of us upon God but not of God upon us) precludes grounding one’s worth (which is what boasting is) in one’s self. But in the case of the divine decree, no appeal or explanation is sought outside of God.

So in short, if God unconditionally determines our evil choices, he’s most certainly their author and agents are most certainly not guilty (in my opinion of course!). But if we exercise our free choice in accepting God conditional upon all the things on God’s side of the equation that make our choice even possible, then we are not authors of our own righteousness in the sense you mean (i.e., in the same sense that God is author of our sin).

Tom

#103

Always refreshing and challenging to read, Bill Valencia on Free Will:

Here are several posts of his on the topic: maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/free-will/

And here is an especially well phrased post on LFW: maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2009/05/could-freedom-of-the-will-be-an-illusion.html#more

Tom

#104

Hi Jason:

Very much liked what you said in your post of Tue Jan 11, 2011 6:37 am

However, when you said in reply to buddyb4’s post:

I guess I read his post somewhat differently… (?)
I’m not sure buddy meant to imply he had zero freedom and is completely determined, rather I read it as a very practical application from real life as to the dangers of getting “cocky” about ones success in staying sober. I think he is rightly aware of how close he is to allowing any self congratulatory thoughts that might lead to the very behavior that held him in bondage in the first place. Best just not to go there.

So too with ones “right” or justification to boast. Sure, technically (if one is free) he might have some “credit” coming his way but this might be perhaps the quickest path to “falling off the wagon” via the allure of pride. So best just not go there. And as I hinted earlier, perhaps the reason we are not to boast is not that we have no justification, but that it just raises the chances we will get derailed (given our natures) in our walk with the Lord.

From a positive direction, perhaps this is somewhat similar to the command to pray constantly. No, there is no magic to doing this, but rather it is something which cultivates the proper perspective and attitudes in us. Technically, I’m suggesting, one could actually be saved without praying; but why would you?? So too does refraining from boasting cultivate the proper perspective and attitudes in us.

Perhaps a minor point…

TotalVictory
Bobx3

#105

Tom, I’m fine with not focusing on whether LFW exists. I’d thot you’d offered rationales for thinking it could be real, and I thot a motivator for defining a qualification that defeats its’ association with pride, was thinking LFW is a reality.

On boasting, I explained why determinism most plainly and directly defeats the logic of appealing to pride in our choices and actions. You offered no critique. And you’d conceded LFW is “motivating” for some people’s pride, who think its’ view that we carry the responsibility for our course justifies appealing to that which is our part for pride’s innate making of comparisons. You respond, “No one could think making better choices is a cogent way to determine that one is of superior worth, and also agree that love insures everyones’ worth unconditionally.”

But that’s precisely what my tradition does and thinks. You rightly say that assumes that ‘worth’ can be grounded in more than just God’s love. I.e. you are stipulating that ‘worth’ can ONLY be measured by how loved we are. Thus ANY thing or distinction is defined as irrelevant. But almost no one thinks or defines things this way. Christians typically see that all are guaranteed love and worth, AND that some people’s superior stewardship of that makes them worth even more. Why can’t they respond, I don’t agree with your definition. People who make better more responsible choices obviously provide higher value.

Of course I agree that if you define any superiority or comparisons as illicit, then NO philosophy is allowed to offer any rationale for pride. But in the real world, it seems to me that the intrinsic logic of competing philosophies does make a difference. As you say, some day in eternity, we’ll laugh about these humbling mind bogglers!

#106

Tom,

I think I’m grasping your response. Again correct me if I’m wrong. I undersand you to argue that neither LFW nor Determinism has any defect. Whatever system uses either will simply define the form of LFW or DET and that will define whether or not the system has a defect. So neither are defective.

Is that right?

#107

Hi everyone,

Great discussion! I feel like some really good points have been made on both sides. While I don’t think I have much to add in response to the OP that hasn’t already been said, I did want to say a few things in defense of theological determinism, as I’ve noticed there have been a few objections raised against it in the course of the discussion.

  1. Assuming the existence of a benevolent God, the present existence of evil would only be problematic for theological determinism if it was inconsistent with the ultimate well-being of those who experience it, and could in no possible way contribute to their future happiness. But why assume this? Although evil may be understood as that which is opposed to one’s present happiness, it need not be understood as resulting in irreversible harm.

  2. If love requires LFW, then it means that, after any given choice to love has been made, it must have been possible for the agent to have chosen not to love. But what could possibly account for this change in outcomes if everything leading up to the agent’s choice (i.e., the various influences and factors involved in the circumstances) remained unchanged? The only possible, non-deterministic explanation for such a change in outcomes is that a truly random event took place. So if love requires LFW (at least, for finite beings), then what it actually requires is the possibility that an inexplicable, random event could change the outcome of a decision. But who seriously believes that love could not exist among finite beings apart from such a bizarre requirement? And why should this only be a requirement for finite beings and not for God (who, according to John, “is love”)?

  3. Just because we must deliberate as if the future is unsettled doesn’t mean it actually is. It is our ignorance as finite beings (e.g., ignorance of what is always in our best interests, and of the consequences of our decisions) that makes living as if the future is “open” and undetermined an unavoidable part of our creaturely existence. There is no need to appeal to LFW to account for this universally shared human experience.

  4. LFW is not necessary for responsibility/accountability. The only conditions that need to be met for a being with a capacity for moral decisions to be considered morally responsible for a choice or action are 1) that the choice or action must be caused by the agent (such that the choice or action would not have occurred apart from the agent), and 2) that the choice must be governed by a motive. To go beyond a person’s motive for choosing to do something is to lose sight of their moral responsibility altogether, since a person’s choice or action cannot be determined as praiseworthy or blameworthy apart from the motive behind it. This fact seems to render the existence of antecedent causes irrelevant insofar as a person’s moral responsibility is concerned.

  5. The fact that God chose to create this world does not mean he was “free” to have chosen otherwise. God chose to create this world in the way and at the time he chose to create it because it pleased him to create it in the way and at the time he chose to create it (Ps 115:3; 135:6; Isaiah 46:10). If God had wanted to create our world in a different way or at a different time than he did - i.e., if it would have pleased him to do so - then I believe we can be sure that he would have. But since he didn’t, I don’t see any reason to think that he could’ve chosen otherwise (and this would especially hold true if God’s decision to create was a rational decision). God would have to have had different desires to have chosen differently than he did. But where do God’s desires to do what he does when he does it come from? Answer: they’re determined by his unchanging, self-existent nature, and thus cannot possibly be anything other than what they are.

#108

LOL Aaron on no 5. - So God has some epistemic distance in order to be free :slight_smile:

I do agree with no. 4. I think this is what I sense as being accurate.

If I’m understanding TGB correctly, it seems that there is nothing defective even with sin so long as it’s accompanied with other properties that null it’s effects. :slight_smile: ok ok TGB I know a pie in the face is in order - I just had to say that :slight_smile:

#109

Aaron, possibly there remains minor distinctions between us on this issue, but I gotta tell you that I was relieved to see that I wasn’t going to have to withstand both you and Tom united on this issue. In that case I’d really be toast!

#110

Bob: You respond, “No one could think making better choices is a cogent way to determine that one is of superior worth, and also agree that love insures everyones’ worth unconditionally.” But that’s precisely what my tradition does and thinks.

Tom: I’m sorry, Bob, but I have to question the claim that Calvinism as a tradition (if that’s the tradition you’re talking about) affirms the equal and unconditional love of God for all human beings. A Calvinist who was also a universalist could make the claim (although she’d have to offer some rationale for why a God of love would unconditionally predetermine all the evil our world has known, and why he should unconditionally predetermine that the vast majority should go to hell at all, but that’s an entirely different thread!).

Bob: You rightly say that assumes that ‘worth’ can be grounded in more than just God’s love. I.e. you are stipulating that ‘worth’ can ONLY be measured by how loved we are. Thus ANY thing or distinction is defined as irrelevant. But almost no one thinks or defines things this way.

Tom: The Eastern Church has for 2,000 years. And I can only hope that today’s Evangelicals would stop teaching people (by implication?) to believe they can earn just a bit more love from God by their good performance. In the end, the value we place on a person is just a function or expression of the love we have for them. If one believes one is already infinitely and inexpressibly loved by God, one believes his value is already incalculable. No one who believed this would also believe they have it in their power to increase the value God places on them.

Bob: Christians typically see that all are guaranteed love and worth, AND that some people’s superior stewardship of that makes them worth even more. Why can’t they respond, I don’t agree with your definition. People who make better more responsible choices obviously provide higher value.

Tom: I agree they may provide higher ‘ultilitarian’ value. That is, God can use a saint to do good that a sinner can’t be used for. The prayer of a righteous man avails much, but the prayer of the unrighteous? Not so much. But this utility doesn’t make it possible for God to love them more than he already does. God demonstrated his love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for the ungodly.

Bob: Of course I agree that if you define any superiority or comparisons as illicit, then NO philosophy is allowed to offer any rationale for pride.

Tom: I’m becoming more convinced that I’m just about at the place where I categorically deny that human beings are ever justified in boasting, or in feeling superior (in the sense we’ve been debating), or in making the sorts of comparisons that lead them to conclude they are of greater worth and value to God than others are. If they do feel this, then it’s because they’ve misrelated to some truth, period.

Bob: But in the real world, it seems to me that the intrinsic logic of competing philosophies does make a difference.

Tom: But shouldn’t we be agreeing as followers of Christ that our calling in the real world is to inform people that their inestimable worth and value to God as beloved persons can’t be earned or bought by any means whatsoever and that this means nothing we do, even the good we do (even freely), can add to the already incalculable value God has chosen to place on us?

Auggy: I think I’m grasping your response. Again correct me if I’m wrong. I undersand you to argue that neither LFW nor Determinism has any defect.

Tom: I’m saying that anybody who claims that a) God equally and unconditionally loves all persons, and that b) the worth and value of our existence in God’s eyes is a function of his unconditional love, cannot also claim that their value and worth as persons (which value grounds and motivates the formation of identity and motivates choice) is conditional upon their performance or increasable by their performance.

Tom

#111

Hi Aaron!

So good to hear from you. I’m always refreshed and challenged to read your comments. Good stuff. You have very nicely clarified the competing claims and the chief objections to LFW (the ‘exercise’ problem, or the problem of motivation, and the ‘randomness’ problem). Some of the authors I mentioned (R. Kane, Timothy O’Connor, Bill Vallicella, Thomas Pink, and lots of other libertarians), have offered plausible accounts of LFW on these two crucial points. Convinced determinists aren’t buying, so the debate as a whole seems stalemated I think. I’m not sure.

On your (1)—the idea that the actual history of evil in our world is in its entirety (that’s what would need to be defended) necessitated by the ultimate well-being of human beings is a very difficult pill for me to swallow. Indeed, I’m unable to make any sense of the claim that God is perfectly benevolent on the supposition that all the actual evil creation has known is predetermined by God for our well-being. I’m all ears. What is it about our well-being (as actualized in the final state) that ‘necessitates’ the world’s actual evil in its entirety?

On your (2)—yes, LFWers have to do a much better job of clarifying a coherent model of LFW without it reducing to randomness. I think some excellent offerings are out there. But let me just add that in spite of the apparent force of this objection (which I don’t want to deflect), other claims that are entailed in a deterministic & compatibilistic worldview are as or more untenable to me (your Hobbesian understanding of responsibility in (4) for example). The intuition that moral responsibility requires a freedom to choose between alternative possibilities is as deep and strong as it gets. I just don’t find Hobbes convincing on an intuitional level or practical on a social level. That my “desires” or “motivations” favour the actual choice I make at the time doesn’t at all seem enough to ground my personal and moral accountability IF those very desires and motivations are themselves the effect of antecedent causes. On a strict determinist account every ‘cause’ carries its ‘effects’ within it so to speak. Each cause entails its effect. And this causal chain is both unbroken and all-inclusive. I don’t see how we insert ourselves into this chain, pick out one particular link and then ‘justly’ accuse and punish it for the effect its very existence entails. I appreciate the problem of randomness, but it pales in comparison to the bankruptcy of determinism on the question of personal moral accountability. (OK, ‘bankruptcy’ was strong :wink: )

On (3)—Bill Vallicella has a great piece on deliberation on his blog (which I shared somewhere in this thread). I think you underestimate the objection to compatibilism on this point. I doesn’t seem that our being ignorant of outcomes is at all adequate to explain the experience of deliberation if we also believe those outcomes and the deliberations by which we settled on them are determined in their minutia by causes in our remote past. In other words, it’s not that we don’t understand how our predetermined future will in fact pan out that explains deliberation. It’s that our deliberation is where which future possibilities get actualized occurs, and not in the deterministic sense of pointing to a specific link in the causal chain and saying, “Hey, here is where effect-C gets determined by cause-B,” but in the libertarian sense of alternative possibilities. For a lot of us at least, when you back up and take in the whole, things fall apart. The additional belief that ‘B’s bringing it about that C’ is itself brought about inexorably by ‘A’s bringing it about that B’ and so forth backwards, really makes mockery of deliberation as a personally responsible enterprise. (OK ‘mockery’ was strong! :wink: )

On (5)—it’s true that the mere “fact that God chose to create doesn’t mean he was ‘free’ to have chosen otherwise.” Nobody’s arguing that. True, God created because it “pleased him to create.” But to posit “good pleasure” or “desire” as explanation enough to settle the debate over the nature of choice is too quick. That is, it may not follow from the fact that God chose to create that he was ‘free’ to have done otherwise, but neither does it follow from the fact that God was pleased to create that he was not free to have done otherwise. But this all reduces back to debates over the mechanics of LFW.

My reasons for believing God’s existence and fullness do not entail any choice to bring non-God entities into existence lie in other concerns about necessary existence and aesthetics. The Eastern Fathers I’m afraid have poisoned my mind on this score! I mean, even if I were convinced that God had decreed everything that occurs in the world (good and evil), I’d still hang on to the belief that LFW is coherent JUST to sustain God’s ontological independence from the world (or any world he might create).

Tom

#112

Bob: Aaron, possibly there remains minor distinctions between us on this issue, but I gotta tell you that I was relieved to see that I wasn’t going to have to withstand both you and Tom united on this issue. In that case I’d really be toast!

Tom: But look what I gotta do! I have to withstand all three of Bob, Auggy, and Aaron. Better start spreadin’ the butter 'cause I’m serving up toast!

:cry:

#113

Tom, you’re too worthy a respondent to get any sympathy! And you realize Auggy and Aaron toast me on other of my oddities (and you’ve posed some good questions to Aaron)! I’m seeing that among many shared affirmations that outshine our philosophical variations is our shared recognition that pride calls for a strong defeator.

I’m afraid that when I said “my tradition” combines believing in universal love andvariations in worth, I didn’t mean Calvinism, but an essential Arminian Baptist one (with eternal security tacked on). I agree that Fuller’s Calvinism didn’t convince me that such a system led to God really loving anyone but the elect (tho it stipulated definitionally that it does).

I really agree with your view of valuation, and knew that you’d concede differences in utilitarian value. But outside Eastern Orthodox culture, it appears to me that everyone is convinced differences in utility is precisely the way to compare differences in ultimate value too. But I do hope your approach can convince them that superior choices don’t reflect superior people, nor make someone more valuable.

#114

Aaron,

Let me float out a thought here. I’m just trying this out. Perhaps this is the more important point, but if determinism is true, God doesn’t determine evil for the purpose of bringing about some ultimate good. That sort of teleological explanation is ruled out by the determinism you’re supposing. In determinism (to jump into the causal chain randomly for an example), A causes B (or necessitates B), B causes C, C causes D, etc. Causes ‘necessitate’ their effects. Effects don’t necessitate their causes. One can say “I desire ultimate good X, and Y is the only way to get me X, and ultimate-X is worth having to tolerate temporary-Y, so I’ll determine Y to get to X.” But that sort of teleological deliberation (or even the underlying logic) is undermined if we say all the movements of the causal chain are determined by the necessity of God’s own nature. You’re arguing teleologically that all the evil of our world is explained by being the necessary means to achieve our ultimate well-being. However, everything God does (including the choice to determine this particular world with all its evil) follows necessarily as a link in the causal chain that begins in the necessity of God’s very nature. The world (its evils and its eschaton) could not be otherwise because God could not be otherwise. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that if determinism is true, God’s determining all these evils cannot be necessitated teleologically by the ultimate well-being of the world; rather, the necessity of God’s very existence and nature necessitates evil–and there we must stop in our explanation of evil. That good eventuates matters not in a causal chain. God is the explanation for all the particular evils our world has known, and not in the sense that God’s contemplating the end motivates God’s choice of the means. That’s not possible on a deterministic framework that folds into it God himself for the simple reason that the end God contemplates is already the result of the causal chain that brought it about. It can’t also be the explanation for why God chooses to determine evil. Given the logic and asymmetry of causal chains, evil necessitates our ultimate well-being, not the other way around. And THAT, I submit, is a good reason to reject determinism. David Bentley Hart has a great quote on evil in the Eastern tradition as being the pure privation of good. I’ll try to track it down.

Pax,
Tom

#115

Ok, The waters are very deep for us with small sails. So I’m strugginling to keep up.

TGB, Aaron’s (1) (if I understood it correctly) was that Determinism would only be in trouble if the ultimate outcome of any person should end in some sad tragedy. You responded with “the actual history of evil in our world is in its entirety”

Can you explain this response of yours and how your statement is relevant to Aaron’s point? pretty please.

#116

Auggy: Aaron’s (1) (if I understood it correctly) was that Determinism would only be in trouble if the ultimate outcome of any person should end in some sad tragedy. You responded with “the actual history of evil in our world is in its entirety.” Can you explain this response of yours and how your statement is relevant to Aaron’s point?

Tom: My eyes are bleeding, so let me go clean up first…

…OK, I’m back.

Yeah, so I might be misunderstanding Aaron. That’s possible. But per the determinism you’re (and Aaron I think) arguing, the perfectly benevolent God determines all the evil our world has known, and he does so because our the ultimate well-being of persons necessitates evil. And not just some evil, or evil per se. That’s nebulous. It has to necessitate every evil the world has seen. Why? Because God is perfectly loving, and presumably a perfectly benevolent God would never desire evil for its own sake. So it’s fair to ask (a) How does our ultimate well-being require all the specific evils our world has known? He would only determine an evil for its utility. So there’s utility in every evil, given that God is all-loving and all-determining. Not a single evil act could be removed without loss of some ultimate good (on your view that is).

But apart form (a), there’s an additional objection, and that is that (b) the sort of teleological deliberation that Aaron’s description of God’s determination of evil requires is simply not possible (I don’t think) on a deterministic framework. Given the asymmetry of a causal chain, our ultimate well-being can’t ‘necessitate’ the evil the precedes it. No ‘effect’ necessitates its ‘cause’ (except in terms of reconstructing the past from the present were we to know everything there is to know about the present; but that’s not what Aaron’s talking about). Aaron means to say (I think) that our well-being necessitates all the evil God determines in the sense that our well-being motivates God’s choice to determine those evil as means. But that kind of logic (or deliberation) can’t be made sense of given determinism, for the flow of a deterministically causal chain is asymmetrical; that is, what explains God’s choice to create and determine evil are antecedent causes, not eschatological ones. A determinist who believes God’s own choice to create and determine evil are determined by the necessity of God’s own existence shouldn’t be able to argue that God is motivated to determine evil because of ultimate well-being that follows.

Mind you, I’m just floating (b) out there as food for thought.

Tom

#117

Hi Tom!

You said:

I confess that the most I’ve read on the subject of LFW (aside from a few articles here and there online) is pretty layman-friendly (e.g., Free Will: A Very Short Introduction by Thomas Pink and Making Sense of Your Freedom by James Felt). But I found the offerings of these libertarians to be far from compelling (although I certainly don’t see the shortcomings in their arguments as reflecting on their learning or intelligence, but rather attribute it to the LFW position they’re trying to articulate and defend :wink: )! So of the accounts offered by libertarians, which one(s) do you see as most plausible and compelling?

If God is a perfectly wise and benevolent being (as we both believe) then it doesn’t make sense to me to think that he would either decree or allow anything to befall those he loves which would not in some way contribute to their well-being (whether present well-being, future well-being, or both). For me, this is just a given. So without knowing how every specific evil experienced in this world will contribute to the ultimate well-being of all, I’m confident that there would be no evil if its existence wasn’t consistent with God’s perfectly benevolent nature. Now, you believe God is love, and that he was free (in a libertarian sense) to create this world or not. But if this is true, how do you see it as being consistent with God’s wisdom, love and freedom to create to allow those whom he loves to experience that which is inconsistent with their ultimate well-being, and which can in no possible way contribute to their future happiness? How is it consistent with God’s wisdom, love and freedom as Creator to allow gratuitous evil? I say “allow” because I assume you believe that, at the very least, God would have foreseen as possible “all the particular evils our world has known.” Or do you believe that God did not foresee all of the evil of human history as even a possibility?

Until a coherent, plausible model of LFW is offered, I cannot help but understand the “freedom” of which you speak above as inexplicable randomness, for that is the only possible alternative to causation of which I can presently conceive. And I fail to see how anyone can be held responsibile for an inexplicable, random event. My intuition tells me that there has to be just as much of a causal relationship between the motive and the choice as there is between the agent and the choice in order to view the agent as morally responsible. At the end of the day, it just seems irrelevant to me whether a person “could’ve chosen otherwise”; the fact is that they didn’t choose otherwise, and if they had a motive for why they chose the way they did (i.e., if they didn’t really want to choose otherwise), then it seems reasonable to believe they can and should be held, to some degree at least, morally responsible for their decision. With that said, I do think it’s helpful, however, to think of all finite beings as being relatively responsible rather than ultimately responsible for any given choice. That is, I don’t think God punishes or rewards any finite being as if they were ultimately responsible for any decision or action. Only God, I believe, is ultimately responsible for everything that happens.

If a person’s guilt or innocence is determined by their motive, I just don’t see why there’s any need to go beyond the motive when trying to determine or understand moral responsibility; to do so just seems superfluous. It just seems to me that we’re no longer talking about one’s moral responsibility if we’re no longer talking about their motive for doing something.

But simply believing that the outcomes of our deliberation have already been determined by God doesn’t change the fact that we’re still ignorant of what those outcomes will be, and of what is always in our best interest. Even if theological determinism is true, we would still live as if the future was at least partially unsettled or “open.” Due to our ignorance, it would simply be impossible not to live in this way. But if that’s the case, then wouldn’t it mean that LFW is no better an explanation of our experience than is determinism? Or are you suggesting that if determinism was true we wouldn’t have any need to deliberate?

So do you think God’s decision to create this world when and how he created it was a rational decision?

The only problem I would see with believing that God creates by necessity is if he didn’t want to create but was compelled by some external power to do so. But I believe God chooses to create - and perhaps has been creating for as long as he’s been thinking sequentially (which I assume he’s always done) - because he is, by nature, a Creator. Just as I believe God necessarily loves because it’s his nature to do so, so I believe that God necessarily creates because it’s his nature to do so. In fact, his loving and his creating may be seen as one and the same insofar as the creation of rational entities goes, since I believe the end for which God brings finite rational entities into existence is to maximize their happiness (which is of course what love is always seeking to do).

Perhaps I’ve misunderstood your argument, but the above is precisely what I do affirm. I believe God’s self-existent, rational and benevolent nature demands that every finite causal chain which God chooses to begin will necessarily end in the ultimate well-being of all rational beings whose existence begins in the causal chain. And everything that happens from the beginning of the finite causal chain until the teleological outcome is reached (i.e., the maximal happiness of all finite persons) is necessary to this outcome being reached, including “all the particular evils” that take place along the way.

#118

Great comments Aaron!

Are there any other libertarians out there? Wanna give a guy a hand? Come on, I’m being served up on the platter here.

Aaron: If God is a perfectly wise and benevolent being (as we both believe) then it doesn’t make sense to me to think that he would either decree or allow anything to befall those he loves which would not in some way contribute to their well-being (whether present well-being, future well-being, or both). For me, this is just a given.

Tom: It’s a given for me too. But it doesn’t follow from the fact that God would only determine (or allow) some evil in our best interests that all the evil that exists has been determined (or allowed) by God in our best interests. I think what you mean is that no evil that occurs could possibly occur unless God had determined or allowed it. That is a stronger claim than if God ever determines some evil he does so in our best interests. In other words, determinism doesn’t follow from the conjoining of ‘necessary divine goodness’ and ‘the existence of evil’.

Aaron: Now, you believe God is love, and that he was free (in a libertarian sense) to create this world or not. But if this is true, how do you see it as being consistent with God’s wisdom, love and freedom to create to allow those whom he loves to experience that which is inconsistent with their ultimate well-being, and which can in no possible way contribute to their future happiness?

Tom: I go with an open view form of the standard free-will defence: a) God intends all persons for loving relations, b) such relations require created beings to freely participate in becoming loving beings, c) such freedom implies risk, d) such love is worth the risk (more on this later if you want). Hence, God allows the possibility of evil because its possibility (not its actuality, as in your view) is entailed in the possibility for human loving relations.

Aaron: Until a coherent, plausible model of LFW is offered, I cannot help but understand the “freedom” of which you speak above as inexplicable randomness, for that is the only possible alternative to causation of which I can presently conceive. And I fail to see how anyone can be held responsible for an inexplicable, random event.

Tom: Do the same intuitions really tell you that a person is morally responsible for actions even when the motives for those actions are determined by antecedent causes in the remote past? I don’t see how one argues that the agent isn’t responsible for his actions if they’re random (because his actions are not sufficiently linked to the agent as a rationally motivated chooser) but he is responsible if his actions are determined by antecedent factors that determine what his motives shall be. I think Thomas Pink is right, if both these options (determined by antecedent factors OR random) are unacceptable, then there must be a third option.

Aaron: If a person’s guilt or innocence is determined by their motive, I just don’t see why there’s any need to go beyond the motive when trying to determine or understand moral responsibility…

Tom: But you admit no qualification whatsoever of ‘motives’, as if any history of their formation will do so long as some motive stands to account. But surely if motives are as determined as anything else is by antecedent causes, one is justified in questioning motive as a sufficient ground for holding one accountable for one’s actions. How do the motives that determine our actions render us responsible if actions/causes antecedent to us determine our motives? One might as consistently remove motive altogether from such an explanation with no loss or misappropriation of ‘responsibility’.

Aaron: But simply believing that the outcomes of our deliberation have already been determined by God doesn’t change the fact that we’re still ignorant of what those outcomes will be…

Tom: True, believing that outcomes are determined doesn’t change the fact that we’re ignorant of what outcomes are the determined ones. But what it seems to libertarians to do is undermine the integrity of deliberation as the means of responsible arbitration in determining which possibility gets actualized. This may just reduce to competing intuitions. I’m not sure. If so, then there’s little to actually debate about.

Aaron: So do you think God’s decision to create this world when and how he created it was a rational decision?

Tom: I think it was, yes.

More to say, but I gotta run!

Peace,
Tom

#119

Aaron, two recent and interesting positive accounts of LFW that might interest you are:

Laura Waddel Ekstrom’s Free Will: A Philosophical Study (2000)
informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/ekstrom/

and

Randolph Clarke’s Libertarian Accounts of Free Will (2006).
amazon.com/Libertarian-Accounts-Free-Randolph-Clarke/dp/0195306422/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1295210856&sr=8-1

Tom

#120

Tom,

Thanks again for your thoughtful and challenging responses, as well as for the links. I’ve already skimmed the article, but it’s probably going to take me a few reads to digest it and understand what exactly is being said! While I remain unconvinced of LFW, I’m certainly open to the possibility that I’m wrong about this and that determinism is false. And unlike my belief in UR, I can’t really say that I “hope” I’m right and you’re wrong (unless, of course, LFW entailed that some might never be reconciled to God)! Anyway, thanks again for your thoughts. I’ll make sure you’re one of the first to know if I ever become a libertarian!

In Christ,
Aaron