The Evangelical Universalist Forum

Free Will and Universal Reconciliation

Evangelical Universalism Arguments for Evangelical Universalism
#1

Is belief in Libertarian Free Will consistent with UR?

  • No. If there’s Libertarian Free Will, then some people could resist God forever.
  • Yes. Practically speaking, no one can resist God forever.
  • There’s no simple “Yes” or “No” answer.

0 voters

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I know someone who believes in post-mortem salvation, but cannot go so far as to affirm UR, because he thinks at least some people could hold out forever—resist God forever. Others think that no one could hold out forever. If one could, he’d have to have an infinite will like that of God’s.

What do you think?

#2

Well I vote 2nd one, Arminianism made the free will just like Muslims, they believe you are free to choose God or not,
but since Bible is talking about UR, which God says he desires all to be saved, so we can see that God didn’t want to choose just few and destroy the rest, this destroys the belief of traditional Trinity (close family),
Libertarian Free Will of Arminianism, and False thinking about God’s justice,

God is more powerful than us, he is not weak, Jesus will fail to save the whole world!

they believe God’s justice is between the Good and bad, rich and poor,
they problem is they CARE about this world, notice Jesus said Love not the world, so what do you make of this?
it means there is no difference between the good and bad, rich and poor, Justice in the Kingdom of God means everyone
will be rich (no one will suffer), in same level, not like this world. as in the parable of rich man and Lazarus,
you see it wasn’t important for Lazarus to be rich, he was a spiritual beggar, only the rich man was deceived,
Arminianism brings the justice between the rich man and Lazarus (who was poor),
because they care about this world :slight_smile:

notice even rich people in this world are suffering in their life more than poors,

Luke 16:20 But there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, full of sores, who was laid at his gate,

Arminianism took the Bible literally.

If I’m wrong you can correct, it is your Topic :wink:

#3

The problem here is that we are talking about mathematical concepts like the probability of someone resisting forever and infinite time. However there are two problems. One is that the universe as a whole is an experiment that we only do once, so it has just one outcome, there is no probability. The second is that (and I’m a follower of Cantor here) there are different kinds of infinity.

From God’s point of view all that he has to achieve is that everyone repents. It doesn’t matter how improbable the solution, as long as that is what actually happens it’s a win.

I’ve tried to express this in a time travel story. Our heroes have gone back in time to meet Boadicea, Queen of the Iceni. They are about to go into battle against a particularly nasty Roman legion. Tom has already seen the possible outcomes:

*“Er,” Tom was looking at the ground in the way that meant he didn’t want to say something. “Boadicea’s
decided that the first half­dozen chariots will go in light and fast, ram the shield wall with their poles and try to
break through.”
“She can’t!” Lavinia was furious. “Firstly we’d be asking the ponies to smash into a solid obstruction. I
know ours are raving mad, but they’re not stupid. Secondly even if we did it we’d probably not break the shield
wall. And thirdly, even if we broke through, the Romans would close up again before our foot soldiers get there,
while we’d be horribly injured and on the wrong side.”
Tom shrugged. “It’s her army. If you want to talk her out of it feel free to try, I couldn’t get anywhere.”
“I will.” Lavinia’s voice was firm. “But first let’s get one thing clear. If we don’t go­”
“She sees us as supernatural thingies sent by their gods to help her. If we pull out the gods have
abandoned her, she’ll give up, no battle, no legend, no Britain, no industrial revolution­”
“You can’t be sure,” snapped Lavinia. “History’s not an exact science.”
“Time travel is,” said Tom.
Lavinia opened her mouth to protest, then charged off towards Boadicea’s tent. I couldn’t make out the
exact words, but there was a lot of furious shouting, and Lavinia came out carrying a bucket, her face dark with
anger, like the start of a really good thunderstorm.
*

The point is that we aren’t talking about probabilities of outcomes, but just one outcome, however improbable.

#4

If free will exists forever then there’s no guarantee – there’s not even any probability that – all (or any) will be saved. If LFW means one thing it means that acts cannot be determined by an agent without destroying his LFW.

But, if we suppose that LFW is granted only for various times and under various circumstances it is perfectly possible to hold to UR. The key is understanding WHY LFW was given in the first place and THAT it can and will be overridden when it is best for the creature that it be overridden.

(For the “why it was give” see my most recent topic on general discussion. I do not think it is because only with LFW are acts of a certain “value” or “worth” of goodness in God’s eyes.)

#5

I, too, voted for #2, but for a different reason.

I believe in libertarian free will. God created man with free will and He seldom interferes with it. That is the reason He usually does nothing to prevent the horrible atrocities which occur on this earth, the tortures, the rapes or little girls, etc., etc. For God wants people to choose to submit to Him of their own free will. He has no interest in a race of robots who can do nothing else but obey Him.

It is NOT the case that there is just one possible outcome to earthly events. Earthly events are not pre-ordained. If that were the case, God would be guilty of the many atrocities which occur. What people do is the result of their ability to choose.

Time travel is logically impossible, and so doesn’t enter into the equation. For example, suppose you were able to travel one hour into the past. Would you meet yourself? And if so, which one would be the real you? The one at the temporal point of an hour ago, or the one who time-travelled to the temporal point of one hour ago? Or would there be TWO real yous? Suppose you went a further hour into the past taking the other “you” with you. Would there then be THREE yous at that temporal point? Would you be able to repeat this until there was a thousand or more yous? The very concept of time travel does not make sense.

So can a free will agent choose to rebel forever? I say this is not practically possible—even in seemingly unlikely cases. How likely is it, if you tossed 100 dice, that they would all come up as fives? It seems highly unlikely. Yet if you tossed 3 dice 216 it is LIKELY that they would all come up fives at least once. If you tossed 10 dice 60,466,176 times, it is LIKELY that they would all come up fives at least once. If you tossed the hundred dice 65331866337 (followed by 67 zeroes) times, it is LIKELY that they would all come up fives at least once. But what if the hundred dice were tossed FOREVER. Wouldn’t it be the case that they would INEVEVITABLY all come up as fives at some point? Wouldn’t this be the case even if you tossed a billion dice?

Though some people might be able to withstand God’s efforts to get them to FREELY choose Him, for a thousand years, or even a million years or more, would they be able to resist FOREVER? This may be theoretically possible, but it would be practically impossible!

#6

Eric Reitan offers a similar argument to that of Paidion. See my article: “Universal Salvation: What Are the Odds?”

#7

I think you’ve missed my point. There may be plenty of possible outcomes, but only one of these actually happens. I’m not convinced that TT is logically impossible, although it has, as you say, some rather startling implications. However if God can genuinely see the future without at the same time negating free will, the rules are very different.

Imagine you are about to watch a football game on a DVD. Because I don’t like football I’ve already skipped to the end and know the result. What you will see is a perfectly free game in which all the players exercise freewill, and until it gets to the end the result is in doubt. But I know the result in advance. In order to avoid spoiling the suspense for you I don’t tell you.

All I’m suggesting is that free choices are still free even if God knows about them in advance.

#8

This argument - and many of those that put forth libertarian freedom as the reason we are ultimately translated into heaven (“the pennies which are glued to the bottom of the box”) - I find flawed for a number of reasons. First, it assumes a LFW choice for God is something of which we can make a 50-50 probability about. I don’t think it’s possible to do that. Each free choice, it seems to me, if it is truly free, would have to have its own unknown probability, independent of all preceding and proceeding events. So you could not compound the probability of an event occurring simply because “it had not yet occurred.” Second, even if we could be near absolutely certain that, given enough time, all pennies will stick to the bottom of the box, it is still likely that out of 1000000000 pennies that ONE will not stick. Third - and I think this is most damaging - it seems the only guarantee for the conditions of which Reitan says the free willed choice is based on – actually “seeing” and “knowing” that choosing God is what he wants us to do, in our best interest, and in line with our desires – involves removing the epistemic distance required for that free choice to be made in the first place. In other words, it is to make us compatibilistically free.

I actually believe that this is what God in fact does. There is no need then to postulate “hypothetical box experiments” to show that God has to shake the box until the PENNY flips. I think God can and does IMPOSE HIMSELF on us in an irresistible way, both in this life and, eventually, forever in the life to come. Personal experience, Scripture, and the nature of God’s love and power - him desiring to fully disclose himself to us - all attest to this ability of God.

The real question is, why would God give us LFW in the first place if he could have made us compatibilistically free from the get go. I’ve tried to go into this on my recent post in the general discussion. In short, I think it has to do with the fact that, unless we were to experience some autonomy and causation ourselves, we could not be able to make the thought “God is the source of all my good” cohere in our minds. The concepts “I” and “source” would be meaningless to us.

#9

To be fair to Reitan, he doesn’t actually say that, if you read the full essay. He acknowledges that the probability may only be 70-30, or indeed any other number. His essential point is that there is always a possibility of the penny sticking, ie of a previously unrepentant individual repenting. And given an infinite amount of time, the possibility of anyone remaining unrepentant becomes vanishingly small.

The epistemic distance issue is far more challenging, and thus far nobody here has given an explanation which properly answers the question why, if God will one day save some people - or even one single person - by removing epistemic distance from them, in the process effectively destroying their freedom, does He not do so for everybody right now, and put an end to all this miserable mess we live in?

#10

Just to toss out a speculative answer to johnnies very good question concerning intervention, what if it was up to ‘us’ to make the conditions for Gods revelation? Ie what if God is waiting, willing for us to do ‘x’ so He could reveal Himself and end this mess?

#11

That’s a very good point. Curiously, when I first started writing about time travel, and trying to make it logically consistent, I discovered that having critical events for which everything else waited actually worked. If you have a character trapped in the past the time travellers could in theory rescue him one second later, unless his absence would in some way wreck history, in which case the time travellers see that he does the right thing after five days, and go to that point in the timeline to rescue him.

#12

I quite like that idea pog, thank you.

I find all the debate about compatibilistic free will versus libertarian free will very confusing. I’m with Paidion on this. For me, the situation is clear and obvious: we are, at all times, free to act however we wish, given our genetic inheritance, environmental influences and innate, God-given conscience. Otherwise, as the Calvinists believe, God is the author of every murder, every rape, every child abuse, an impossible blasphemy.

My italicised qualification is very important, however. As far as I understand it, libertarian free will requires that whenever we choose to do something we must be free not to have done that thing, or vice versa. But of course, that is an impossibility. To take an extreme example, in what way am I truly “free” to murder my wife, who I love very much? In one sense I am indeed “free” to poison her tea, and of course many spouses have done such things - for money, or lust for another woman, or whatever. But given that I really do love my wife, my love for her, along with my conscience, effectively overrides my freedom to do away with her. Hence my choice not to murder her is not free in the libertarian sense, in that I cannot but not do so.

Thoughts?

#13

I’m glad my idea met with general approval :slight_smile:. It’s what I hold to as part of my participatory/cosmic warfare/open theodicy. We are to pray ‘your kingdom come’ and we are to ‘hasten the day’ of His arrival. The second coming of Christ might very well come via, in and with the participation of the church. An idea, at least … :slight_smile:

Oh, regarding freewill, I think the whole thing is a mystery. But I think we make some choices in a limited, but libertarian anger, other choices are somewhat compatibilist if, others more determined or outside our control even if we think we made a choice. Humans are complex, and we’ve barely scratched the surface of freedom, brains, mind and behaviour.

#14

I agree with Pog that free will is a mystery. I believe it is a mystery because we cannot offer a rational account of the interaction of divine agency and human agency, and we cannot offer such an account because we cannot rationally comprehend God in his divine substance and cannot comprehend either his transcendence nor his immanence (see the long quote from Herbert McCabe that I posted in another thread). Hence sometimes the exercise of our freedom sometimes appears, to us, to be liberatarian, sometimes compatibilist.

Would it be accurate to say that in this life the human being is never truly free because he neither possesses all the necessary knowledge that he needs to make an irrevocable decision either for or against God and because, except for the saints, he is never free from disordered desires and passions (Talbott’s position)? And yet, having said this I must disagree with myself: the Apostle Paul clearly asserts that in baptism we have died to sin and risen to new life and freedom.

Clearly God does not present himself to the large majority human beings in an irresistible and utterly compelling way. We have no choice but to live by faith. Must we not presume that this living in and by faith is a valuable thing? “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” May it not be related to God’s purpose of soul-making, that it forms human persons in ways that cannot be accomplished in other ways?

#15

This cuts to the chase, akimel. But there is a very tricky little conundrum hidden in your statement. You say that God does not present himself to the “large majority” of human beings in an irresistible way, and I agree with you. He preserves the epistemic distance that is essential to our freedom - and without which it would be utterly pointless to create us in the first place.

But. And it is a huge but :smiley: . If God ever, once, lifts the veil of that epistemic distance, then surely he could do so for all of us. And yet he does not.

Why not?

#16

I approach it something like this: the epistemic distance between mankind and God was collapsed as far as it can go in Christ - in Jesus on the cross we really see God as He truly is (love etc). The rest is now just a matter of us seeing that revelation better; a mix of improving our spiritual eyesight (so to speak) and removing the barriers that blind us (sin, evil, demons, human nature, poor environment etc). God’s mostly done His bit already - and the Spirit constantly works as much as He can to illuminate us depending upon our ability to receive.

#17

I need to clarify my statement. I should have written “Clearly God does not present himself to the large majority human beings in an irresistible and utterly compelling way in this life.” I pray and hope that God will reveal himself “irresistibly” to every human being in the afterlife or at the general resurrection.

#18

But my question is, if God is going to do that - reveal himself irresistibly in the afterlife - then why doesn’t he do it now?

#19

I don’t think I have missed your point. For the “only one which actually happens” hasn’t happened yet. The outcome which will have happened (after it does) cannot be known in advance, unless it has been predetermined. And that is just the point. The future hasn’t been predetermined. That “one and only” outcome will be caused, at least in part by the free choices people will make, and these choices cannot be known in advance.

We are aware of what you are suggesting. But it isn’t logical. If God knows them in advance, then they are going to occur.
It is true that God knows all things, but the future does not yet exist, and so cannot be known.

There are no logical propositions about the future. A “logical proposition” is a statement which is either true of false.
Suppose it were NOW true that you will raise your hand at exactly noon tomorrow. Then it is impossible for you to keep your hand down at exactly noon tomorrow. Similarly, if it were NOW false that you raise your hand at exactly noon tomorrow, it would be impossible for you to raise your hand at noon tomorrow. Where then, is your free will? And so it would be with all other logical propositions about the future (if there were any).

So what sounds like logical propostions about the future are either statements of intention or prediction.
For example, if I say, “I will go to the city tomorrow”, I am not making a statement about a future action of mine; I am making a statement about my intention. I actually mean, “I intend to go to the city tomorrow.” If I say “It will rain tomorrow” I am making a prediction. Or if I say, “Detroit will win the game”, I am making a prediction.

If God (or anyone else) knows something, then that something he knows can be expressed in a sentence which is either true of false. But sentences about the future are neither true of false NOW. The sentence about you raising your hand at exactly noon tomorrow WILL BECOME either true of false at noon tomorrow when you make your decision either to raise your hand or to keep it down.

In conclusion, since sentences about the future are neither true nor false now, then their truth value cannot be known now. Their truth value is related to the decisions of free-will agents. That is why some of the predictions by God Himself, have sometimes not corresponded to reality. Just one example (there are several more). God said through the prophet Jonah, “Forty days and Nineveh will be overthrown.” This was NOT a conditional prophecy; it was an absolute prophecy. When God looked at the hearts of the Ninevites, it seemed that they would not repent. But they had free will! They DID repent. And so God changed His mind and did not bring about the disaster that He said He would bring.

When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it. (Jonah 3:10 ESV)

Now if God had KNOWN they were going to repent and turn from their evil way and that He wouldn’t bring disaster to them after all, why would He have SAID that He would bring disaster to them in 40 days? God doesn’t lie, does He? The scripture says He cannot lie. The only answer to this problem is that God DIDN’T KNOW they would repent and turn from their evil ways. By reading their minds, it seemed to God that they WOULDN’T repent. Thus the prophecy. But when they DID repent of their own free will, God repented (changed His mind) about bringing disaster to them.

#20

Johnny,

You may be interested to check out my response to this question in the general forum. I argue that, without libertarian freedom, we could not make any sense of the notions of “ourselves” and “causation.”