Thanks for your response, Chris. The issues here are tricky, so it would hardly be surprising if one or both of us had fallen into a confusion of one kind or another. But in any event, here is the problem, as I see it, with the above reasoning. According to the relevant libertarian understanding of freedom, I am free with respect to an action A only if it is within my power to do A and it is within my power to refrain from A. That is, freedom always requires the power of contrary choice. So if my doing A is causally determined and I therefore have the power to do A but not the power to refrain from A, then I do not do A freely. I do not do A freely even though in doing A I exhibit the power to do it. Having the power to do A, in other words, in no way entails, all by its lonesome, having the power to refrain from A. Nor do I know of any libertarian who would claim otherwise.
According to Susan Wolf’s conception, however, I act freely in a moral context if, and only if, it is within my power to do the right thing for the right reasons. That is, freedom in no way requires the power of contrary choice. Indeed, according to Wolf, such freedom could even exist in a fully deterministic universe–a conclusion, I presume, that you and I would both reject. But that, I think, is a separate issue. I know of no libertarian who would deny the possibility of someone having the power to do A without having the power to refrain from A. For not even the typical libertarian would claim that all of our actions are done freely.
Does that make any sense to you? Incidentally, would you also want to say that God’s “ability to do good … implies the ability to do bad,” or that the possibility of God’s acting justly implies the possibility of his acting unjustly?
I’m in full agreement with you here. As I have said in previous posts, I think a lot of what we do, or don’t do, in life is not truly volitional. Due to influencing factors over which we have no control, we are bound to act the way we do in certain situations. Only God knows the true extent of those influencing factors, which is why we are commanded not to judge others: we simply don’t know what it’s like to be them, to be subject to the influencing factors to which they are subject, hence we cannot know how we might act were we in their shoes.
If the thing we are bound to do - as the inevitable outcome of the factors influencing us - is a bad thing, we cannot be held morally responsible for it, or condemned for it. Neither should we be punished for it as such - save, perhaps, for the reason that punishment might - I stress might - possibly mitigate or even eliminate one or more of those influencing factors, and hence help us not to do that bad thing in the future. So yes, we are ‘free’ to act wrongly only if we are able to act other than we do.
But are we acting freely in doing something good, or in refraining from doing something bad - even if we have no real alternative? To use the example I brought up earlier, am I ‘free’ to not murder my wife? Well, my instinctive feeling is that I am, and yet I know - really know - that I never could, never will!
Now I confess my poor little brain can’t find the words to ‘explain’ this seeming paradox. It’s just, I suppose you could say, a sort of personal properly basic truth . I’m hoping your good self, or someone else here, might be able to show me that my gut feelings are in fact correct ?
Hi Tom,
I think I’m becoming more deterministic but I’m not sure… The difficulty is with this type of statement:
My question is this, does this mean at the moment of making the decision–weighing the desires/influences for or against murder–the murderer must have the power of contrary choice? (which seems random/schizophrenic and non-sensical to me if the “balance of desires” is in favor of one course of action) Or, (which I would agree with) the murderer is free to choose a contrary choice if he desires to? In other words the balance of influence and desires can change (in this individual) at some point from choosing A to not choosing A, thus he has the power to not choose A.
Edit: Perhaps, one night, the murderer has an opportunity to reflect on an intended murder for the next morning (one he has planned to commit)—but remembers the murder of a friend by someone else and the devastation to his friend’s family, and because of this reflection, his desires change (for the right reasons) and he changes his choice to not commit the murder. Is this the type of “contrary choice” we are speaking of? It seems pretty definite the potential murderer is psychologically capable of murder but also is capable of not committing murder with some (slight?) change to his underlying desires. I don’t think, however, he is capable of both choices at the moment he pulls the trigger.
Enjoying the engagement immensely Tom. Once more unto the breach!
Ok. I see here what you mean. By “power” you do not indicate “ability” in the libertarian sense, but rather something like “that which necessarily leads to some act”.
Yes, I would reject that. “Freedom” would be here a meaningless term - a tautology for “that which determines its consequent” or something functionally equivalent.
True, in the sense employed here I would not say that “having the power to do A” necessarily entailed having the power not to do A. But I DO think no libertarian would say a person under such a “power” would be truly or meaningfully free.
It does make sense, but - and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it was 100% on my end - I just don’t see the purpose. To deny the ability to do otherwise seems to me - if the word has any meaning at all - to deny an agents freedom. To use the term yet smuggle in determinism - what is the point? I do agree that not all our acts need to be libertarianly free to be meaningful. Such acts (such as I described in my post: e.g. laughter, a mother’s love, etc.) would indeed be determined. But so what?* My question is how all this is really relevant to understanding the notion of actual libertarian freedom - the only thing which, in my opinion, can alleviate the problem of evil.
As far as God’s ability to do otherwise. No, I do not think God’s ability to do good implies a simultaneous ability to do bad. My (messy) line of thinking is as follows. We’re finite and created; therefore not immutable, therefore not perfectly self-existent; therefore able “not to be”. God, I hold, is the single, eternally self-caused, all-perfect, necessary being. If we were God, we could not but do good. Since we are not, we may or may not do good. God grants us this power - that is, to be like him, “self-causes” if you will. The fact that we can do otherwise is just the metaphysical necessity given that we are derivative rather than originating.
*Perhaps the problem can be alleviated some by pointing out that a libertarian need not hold an agent always acts or always has the ability to act libertarianly free?
God is the most free of all free-will agents in the Universe! So yes, I would say that God has the ability to choose to do bad. After all, He’s omnipotent, isn’t He? Is it not the case that “With God all things are possible”?
Here is my position on the possibility of God doing bad.
Because of God’s all-loving character, in actuality, He always chooses to do good.
We might compare this with the loving mother who wouldn’t consider killing her child. That is the case because of her character, her total love for the child. Yet it is possible that she might make the choice to kill the child, say if it was a matter of her survival or the child’s. Yes, I know many or perhaps most loving mothers would sacrifice their lives for their children, but it is just possible that at the spur of the moment, some loving mothers might put their own lives first.
However, there is a difference in the case of the Heavenly Father. His character is perfect and completely LOVE. There never arises the possibility that God the Father might do evil so that good might result, or that evil doing would somehow benefit Him. So the Father, because of his totally loving character, always chooses to act according to that character; thus He NEVER chooses to do bad, although He has the ability to so choose.
My trust in the Father’s goodness is not based on the concept that it is impossible for Him to do bad. It is based on His Person and His character. I have faith that He will always choose to do good, though He could choose otherwise.
Believe me, my friend, I understand (and fully appreciate) that people often use “Dr. Talbott” as an expression of affection and respect, and I have no desire, in any case, to exercise control over how others address me. I just wanted people to feel comfortable meeting me here on a first name basis, if that is what they might like to do. But the other side of this particular coin is that people should also feel free to address me in any way they might see fit. I mean, I have been called everything from a heretic to an agent of Satan himself. Hee. Hee. And that is fine with me, although such language may run afoul of the board rules.
Anyway, you make a number of interesting points, Paidion. Here is one:
What I think you are getting at here is what some philosophers call agent causation as opposed to event causation. We normally think of causation as a relationship between events, where one event (or set of events) is the cause of another. But in the case of agent causation, as some libertarians understand it, an agent itself (or a person), which is not reducible to a set of events, is thought to be the cause of certain events, namely those that constitute an action. So the basic idea here is that a person can sometimes originate or initiate an action without being causally determined to do so. I (the agent) might cause my arm to rise, for example, even though nothing causes me to do so. And yes, some philosophers are indeed uncomfortable with such an idea, finding it too mysterious, but others have defended it vigorously and in great detail. For my own part, I think that God represents the best possible example of agent causation, in part because none of his actions are the product of antecedent sufficient causes.
You also wrote:
The important point you make here is that in the end we “must examine the individual act when considering the power of contrary choice”; indeed, we must examine it with a good deal of specificity. What might be psychologically possible for someone in one set of circumstances, after all, might not be psychologically possible in another. For as you point out yourself in a later post, a relatively loving mother might even willingly kill a child “if it was a matter of her survival or the child’s.” But even if true, that would have no relevance to a set of circumstances in which this same mother’s life is not threatened.
So let us now imagine a very specific set of circumstances. Let us suppose that on my older sister’s fifth birthday, someone had offered my loving mother a million dollars (which was worth a lot more back then) if she would sell my sister into some international sex-trade operation. I am as certain as I am of anything that my mother would have found it absolutely unthinkable and therefore psychologically impossible to accept such an offer. And what might have been psychologically possible for her in some other set of circumstances–after old age dementia eventually took away virtually all of her memories, for example–has no relevance, surely, to what might have been psychologically possible for her in the specific circumstances I have just imagined. So I guess my question is: Would you not agree that a specific loving mother might find a terribly harmful action to her children utterly unthinkable and therefore psychologically impossible to do in some specific set of circumstances?
Hi Tom:
Hope the tax man shows you both mercy and grace!
I confess I’m getting slightly disoriented here (or, if you prefer, confused…) by the way certain words are being used. So I’d also hope that Steve and Paidion and Chrisguy could also clarify how they mean certain terms?? (it’d be helpful)
But we’ve been talking about all sorts of hypothetic acts, calling them “A” or being more specific. And in each of these acts is seems as if we sometimes mean that there is a conscious battle, or war going on in our minds between options. This would help me, that would hurt me, this is “right” this is “wrong” and we end up doing … whatever it is. Saying “having the contrary choice” often implies to me this sort of battle; a weighing is going on, an evaluation. That’s how “choices” are made…
On the other hand though those same acts are sometimes portrayed as done simply because it is someone’s inclination to do them. There is no sense of battle, no sense of choice. It’s as if the act being considered (by we, the onlooker and ponderers of acts) is really just a reflection of that persons disposition.
So, for example, the honest banker, the loving mother, have dispositions such that they don’t even perceive that there is a choice. And there certainly is no inner battle going on. And I found that experience myself upon realizing that suddenly my disposition was, and very fiercely and decidedly, turned towards God. I wasn’t weighing costs and benefits. The “contrary” option – which is to say where I’d been all my life up till then, was simply abandoned! – my disposition radically altered.
Now we spend some time here trying to conjure up scenarios where that loving mother would find it in her sphere of thought to consider killing her child a real option (for some supposed benefit) and some inner battle might result. But even if one was able to conjure such a scenario, the original one remains; her disposition is such that, in effect, she always does the right thing and for the right reason. The mere existence of that fact has stunning implications I think…
(So perhaps a more interesting, or shall I say pertinent question would be to take that mother back to the early moments of her moral development when her disposition wasn’t so noble as now… How does that transition take place??)
I’m also questioning, in an admittedly poor way, the subtle assumption that for morality to be fully in play, and determinism kept off the playing field, we must be able to legitimately “blame” the person for his bad choice of actions. For if he is not to “blame”, who can we blame? It’s as if when there is an evil act, we simply cannot allow the moral evil to be free floating; we’ve got to be able to place it at someone’s feet. (and that then serves as some kind of indication that they are “free”)
But, for the person incapable of doing good, we can no longer describe that person as doing evil freely. He may no more have wrestled with doing what his disposition told him to do than did the loving mother.
Lastly then, I wonder if this disposition can just be given us; I’m thinking of Jesus asking Peter how he knew who He (Jesus) was. And Jesus telling Peter he could not have known that unless given it to him from God. I’ve never heard anyone suggest that was a violation of Peters free will; but it sure changed his inclination and disposition! – Same idea with Christ on the cross saying “Father forgive them; for they know not what they do” – or maybe “they’re just acting on their disposition,” and are anything but free in doing so.
Anyway, enjoying the conversation gentlemen and ladies!
Could sin be inevitable due to the absolute impossibility - even for omnipotence - to create a metaphysically perfect state of affairs? I’ve just posted a thread on this called “Leibniz’s Theodicy” which I’d be interested to hear reflections on.
In explaining Susan Wolf’s view, I previously wrote:
To which you responded as follows:
Not quite, Steve. We might express Wolf’s crucial claim here in the form of a subjunctive conditional: If someone should make a free decision to commit murder, then at the time that the free decision is made the person would have the power to choose otherwise. For if freedom just is the power to do the right thing for the right reasons, as Wolf suggests, then one freely acts wrongly in a given situation only if one also has the power to do the right thing in that very same situation; and if one has both of these powers in a given situation, then one indeed has the power of contrary choice in that situation. But whether a person who commits murder, say, really does act freely and thus has the power of contrary choice in this matter is a separate issue. Wolf’s view, in other words, is consistent both with the idea that we sometimes do the wrong thing freely and with the idea that we never do the wrong thing freely because our wrong acts are fully determined.
One further point. My statement that, given Wolf’s understanding, freedom is compatible with determinism may also have given some here the wrong idea. For she would never allow that a fully determined wrong action, such as a murder, would qualify as a free action. So if we did live in a fully deterministic universe, then none of our wrong actions would qualify as free actions on her view.
Thanks,Tom.
I think I’m beginning to understand. In my mind then, and the way I perceive (at least) my choices, none of the** wrong** choices would ever be “free” according to Wolf’s definition as I can’t see that I have the power of contrary choice** at the moment** the decision is made. Hmmm……
TotalVictory began his latest post with these words:
I think that was a great and necessary post, Bob, and, as I see it, you make one great point after another. As you in effect point out, one can easily gloss together two very different kinds of cases: those in which we deliberate and choose between alternatives, trying to make up our minds which course of action to take, and those in which, because our minds are already made up and we are already settled on a course of action, no further deliberation is necessary. With respect to the latter kind of case, you wrote:
As a quick aside, I might point out that your experience of having been turned towards God sounds very much like C. S. Lewis’ description of his own conversion, except that Lewis may have had a greater sense than you do of having deliberated for an extended period of time. But in any event, the loving mother does not typically deliberate and decide whether to care for her beloved baby, and neither does the truly honest banker (are there any left today?) pause, deliberate, and say to himself, “Gee, I could really use some extra cash!” Is that not just one more reason why freedom in such cases in no way requires a power of contrary choice? It appears not to require any further choice at all. The loving mother, for example, may have a host of decisions to make about how best to care for her baby or how to square this responsibility with her responsibilities to other members of her family. But her general disposition to care for the baby is already settled, as you point out, and thus requires no further deliberation and choice. For my own part, I would thus prefer to speak in such cases of someone’s acting freely rather than of someone’s choosing freely.
You also make a great point about blame. My own view, for what it is worth, is that Christianity ultimately requires that we give up the blame game altogether. But that is another (and a much longer) story.
This (in my opinion) – what Bob describes – IS freedom. I want to do what’s right, but like Paul says, I find that the wrong is always near at hand. As Father conforms me more and more to the image of Christ (in which I am a willing patient and perhaps a participant too), I find myself less and less inclined to do the wrong thing which I hate, and I find it easier and easier to do the good thing which I genuinely desire to do. I always WANT to do the thing God requires of me. Sometimes I’m afraid. Sometimes I’m weak. I despise myself for these things though, and I don’t consider my weakness or my fear to be in any way a freedom. It is a bondage.
My husband and I were watching a video last night of one of his favorite musicians. The facility with which he made that guitar sing amazed me. What freedom, to have such skill to express himself! When we have that kind of skill in righteousness and love and beauty, will we still be free to produce sour and inept notes? Technically, I suppose we COULD. But WHY would anyone who can soar through the heavens ever choose to wallow in a pig sty? The less inclined my psyche is toward evil, the more free I become to be what I so greatly desire to be – like Jesus.
“God does not, by the instant gift of his Spirit, make us always feel right, desire good, love purity, aspire after him and his will. Therefore either he will not, or he cannot. If he will not, it must be because it would not be well to do so. If he cannot, then he would not if he could; else a better condition than God’s is conceivable to the mind of God–a condition in which he could save the creatures whom he has made, better than he can save them. The truth is this: He wants to make us in his own image, choosing the good, refusing the evil. How should he effect this if he were always moving us from within, as he does at divine intervals, towards the beauty of holiness? God gives us room to be; does not oppress us with his will; “stands away from us,” that we may act from ourselves, that we may exercise the pure will for good. Do not, therefore, imagine me to mean that we can do anything of ourselves without God. If we choose the right at last, it is all God’s doing, and only the more his that it is ours, only in a far more marvellous way his than if he had kept us filled with all holy impulses precluding the need of choice. For up to this very point, for this very point, he has been educating us, leading us, pushing us, driving us, enticing us, that we may choose him and his will, and so be tenfold more his children, of his own best making, in the freedom of the will found our own first in its loving sacrifice to him, for which in his grand fatherhood he has been thus working from the foundations of the earth, than we could be in the most ecstatic worship flowing from the divinest impulse, without this willing sacrifice. For God made our individuality as well as, and a greater marvel than, our dependence; made our apartness from himself, that freedom should bind us divinely dearer to himself, with a new and inscrutable marvel of love; for the Godhead is still at the root, is the making root of our individuality, and the freer the man, the stronger the bond that binds him to him who made his freedom. He made our wills, and is striving to make them free; for only in the perfection of our individuality and the freedom of our wills call we be altogether his children. This is full of mystery, but can we not see enough in it to make us very glad and very peaceful?”
That is certainly not the way I think in order to indicate that people are free. My point was simply that if a criminal does not have free will then it doesn’t make sense to blame him, for he couldn’t have done otherwise. Or if an altruistic person does not have free will and has helped hundreds of starving people, it doesn’t make sense to reward him. For he couldn’t have done otherwise. But the fact is that thousands of people are being rewarded every day, and thousands are also being blamed and punished every day. Does that make any sense if they have no free will—no ability to choose—if their acts we caused by events external to themselves?
Jurgen Moltmann has written that the freedom we might have one day in the eschaton is a freedom in which we are no longer subject to the “torment” of having to choose between good and evil. He says “[love] only arrives at its goal when it has also overcome the conditions that make sin possible”. So if I understand him correctly, he is saying that although we will be truly free in Heaven - our wills will not be coerced by God - sin will simply not be an option for us.
Do you agree with Moltmann, and if you do, do you agree that his argument adds weight to the possibility we are discussing here - ie that we do not need to have the option of acting differently than we do in order to act freely?
That was expressed so beautifully, Cindy, that I just had to quote the post in its entirety. I also want to underscore the point that, according to Paul, we do not start out with a fully realized freedom; to the contrary, some of the very things that make a power of contrary choice possible–various fears and weaknesses, as you point out, but also the whole context of ambiguity, ignorance, and illusion in which we first emerge and begin making choices–are themselves obstacles to a fully realized freedom. These are the very things that, as I read Pauline theology anyway, initially place the will in bondage to sin and thereby interfere with a fully realized freedom. So what follows are a couple of paragraphs, slightly modified, in which I have elsewhere addressed some of these issues.
Our earliest moral experience, Paul declared, arises from an emerging ability to understand the moral law (or moral rules, if you will), and it is from the beginning an experience of the will in bondage to sin. In Paul’s own words, “If it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. … But sin, seizing an opportunity in the commandment … deceived me and through it killed me” (Rom. 7:7b-8 and 11). He then wrote the very words to which you have alluded above: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. … Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me” (7:15 and 20). All of which seems to accord better with the idea that sin is something that happens to us early in life rather than something we do freely from the beginning of our lives. Like death itself, sin here seems more like an enemy from which we need to be rescued than a perfectly free choice for which we deserve some sort of retributive punishment. It is essentially anything in us that alienates us from others and from God, that is, anything in us that undermines our capacity to love perfectly; as such, it is also, according to the Christian faith, the principal source of human misery. Paul thus exclaimed, “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death [or from sin]?” His answer: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (7:24-25).
Accordingly, in Pauline theology, so I would argue, salvation from sin is not an escape from deserved punishment, nor is it, as some Christians have made it out to be, the removal of an inherited moral taint. It is instead more like being rescued from a kind of slavery or bondage that we are powerless to escape on our own–sort of like being rescued from alcoholism or a drug addiction. For even as an alcoholic might judge it best to refuse another drink and nonetheless find it psychologically impossible to do so, Paul declared himself to be “captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.” Indeed, for all of his talk about the wrath of God (in the early part of Romans, for example), Paul did not seem to regard sin as essentially a matter of personal guilt at all; instead, he held that we are already sinners, already “dead” in our “trespasses and sins,” even before our moral consciousness fully emerges, before we become rational enough to qualify as free moral agents, and before we are fully aware of our own selfish motives and destructive desires. This is not to say, of course, that the concept of personal guilt had no role at all to play in Paul’s thinking. But so far as I can tell, not one word in his letters implies that we somehow deserve retributive punishment either for our inherited character weaknesses (and imperfections) or for the initial bondage of our will to sin; neither does anything there so much as hint that, in the words of Jonathan Edwards, we “are ten thousand times more abominable in his [God’s] eyes than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.” It seems to me, at any rate, that Paul’s own writings were remarkably free from such neurotic appeals to fear and guilt.
Well, that’s enough preaching on my part for now. But these were points that I was planning to get to anyway, and I always prefer for someone else to open up a relevant line of thought.
That was stated extremely well, Paidion–clear and succinct. And believe me, the concern you have expressed here and elsewhere is important, as I see it, and ultimately needs to be taken into account. We need to clarify two seemingly disparate ideas: (1) why freedom, understood as the power of contrary choice, is essential to our very creation, and (2) why the same conditions that make such a power possible in the first place are themselves obstacles to a fully realized freedom. For now, however, I have three quick questions.
First, there is an old adage that virtue is its own reward. I once heard a philosopher—I now forget who it was, unfortunately—comment that we should understand this as, “Virtue needs no reward.” But in either case, the implication seems to be that, contrary to what some libertarians might suppose, an external reward for virtuous behavior is not intrinsically required at all, though it may be pragmatically useful for the purpose of encouraging certain kinds of behavior. So would something be amiss, in your opinion, if virtuous acts were not “being rewarded every day”?
Second, do you find it instructive, as I do, that Paul consistently praised God, not the men and women themselves, for the faithfulness of his co-workers? That certainly seems to accord with his contention that salvation is wholly a matter of grace and “not the result of works, so that no one may boast.”
And finally, would you say that it makes no sense to praise God for his love and his justice, given the logical impossibility of his acting in an unloving or in an unjust way?
These are just questions, Paidion, and in no way intended to dismiss your important concerns, which need to be addressed, as I said. Thanks for an important post.
Tom, thanks so much for your exceedingly kind comments. That means a lot to me, especially since reading your book was such an amazing experience. With John’s writings and much of George MacDonald’s, God spoke wonderful things to my heart through what you wrote. It reminds me of eating a beautiful, wholesome, well-prepared meal. I likely won’t remember exactly what I ate a few weeks later, but the ideas have become a part of me. Thanks for that. It’s meant a great deal in my life.
This is nothing less than Paul’s gospel, I think. The law of the Spirit of Life n Christ Jesus has made us free from the law of sin and death. We were NOT free even though we may never have been in bondage to any man. Freedom to do and be who we long to be is far better than having all sorts of choices set before us – choices we may not understand and which torment us into doing the things we hate. Ransome’s defense of the Venusian Eve in the second book of Lewis’ Space Trilogy comes to mind.
Yes! Struggling with never ending temptations is NOT freedom. When the Son sets us free, we can be free indeed.
Great point. I think you’re right, and this will help me in explaining to people why Paul sounds so harsh here. He’s painting a full portrait of our bondage preparatory to disclosing the magnificent lengths our Lord has gone to in order to rescue us from this otherwise hopeless enslavement.
I haven’t had an opportunity to read through all the comments yet, so forgive me if someone has already mentioned this. I bring it up because I want to do so before I forget. So to this, I would like to add:
It seems to me that there is (at the very least) an implicit idea of a necessary condition of acting freely, that we might not only choose A, not A, or choose B instead of A; but also that whatever choice is made, that choice has a real (even if unpredictable) effect on the future in some way. In other words, a different outcome would (or could) result from choosing in a given situation; A, not A, or B.
As a clarification, this is not the way that I personally see it, but rather what I perceive as an implied idea or assumption often made about the nature of free acts.
Since the questions are out there, I may as well throw in my 2 cents!
Answering question 1 involves answering THE primary question: why would God give us the power of contrary choice?
I’m a bit confused though, Tom, whether or not you actually believe we have this power (if not always at least sometimes). Do you in fact think we posses the power of contrary choice? If so, why do you think God gave it to us?
I believe we do. But as I said, the question is why God gave it to us, because I think he could have - if he wanted to - created us always with insatiable desires such that we would never sin and never possess the power to do otherwise. The conclusion I must therefore draw then is that he must not have wanted to do this. Do you doubt that God could have created us with desires so strong that always precluded the power of contrary choice? If he could have, but has not, why?
I think it has something to do with the fact that he wants to make us like him, like Jesus. That is, he wants to make us into perfect beings who themselves choose the right, the good, the loving in and of itself; not through necessity but through their own very self and will. This I believe requires freedom and agent causation.
I must say I really think this argument is a pure red herring. No libertarian has ever argued that salvation is anything less than totally gratuitous. Would I say I was responsible for my life if I was only living because a heart donor had blessed me with a new heart? That is the essential argument put forth by libertarians. Sin alienates us from God and “throws us in a pit.” God lets down a rope. What person in the pit, having climbed out, would credit themselves?
This is where I think we need to make a necessary distinction – which I have tried a few times to articulate. The primary value in a decision is not in its “ability to do otherwise”. If that were the case it would be virtuous if I chose vanilla rather than chocolate when I picked an ice cream. The ability to do otherwise is not morally praiseworthy per se. Rather, it is the fact that the agent, him or herself is the source of the action that makes it worthy of praise or blame. It is only the metaphysical “price tag”, so to speak, of us being finite, derivative, contingent, that connects “us as causal agents” to the fact that we can do otherwise. We receive our ability to be agents from God, where entails as it were accidentally the ability to do otherwise. God, on the other hand, is himself the sole responsible agent for his good acts and cannot do otherwise – because he is God (necessary, inherently perfect, etc.) He does not suffer from this metaphysical dilemma, as it were.
. I’m hoping your good self, or someone else here, might be able to show me that my gut feelings are in fact correct 
The difficulty is with this type of statement:
So to this, I would like to add: