The Evangelical Universalist Forum

Free Will: Its Essential Nature and Implications

Featured Writers Dr Thomas Talbott
#101

Although I promised in my previous post to answer these questions, it now appears that in your case I need only point to some of your own words and indicate my agreement with them. After reading your follow-up post and rereading your 2:15 p.m. post of March 24, I said to myself, “Wow, there seem to be no substantial disagreements between us at all.” Sure, there are minor disagreements and different ways of phrasing things (how could there not be?), but even these seem subtle enough to be easily resolvable with further discussion.

I especially agree with the following statement from your subsequent post: “This is another reason I cannot believe in determinism - I do not think God could determine sin and at the same time hate it or be against its existence.” In fact, I published a paper back in 2008 in which I defended this very same proposition (and also provided my own answers to the above questions). The paper was entitled “Why Christians Should Not be Determinists: Reflections on the Origin of Human Sin,” and a section entitled “Indeterminism, Separation, and the Mystery of Created Personhood,” is particularly germane to our discussion here. For anyone who might be interested, a typescript copy of that paper (originally published in Faith and Philosophy) is available at the following URL:

willamette.edu/~ttalbott/Determinism.pdf

As for your specific questions above, my answers to them will inevitably reflect your own words that I here lift from your 2:15 p.m. post of March 24:

As you are fully aware, people often ask such questions as: Why would God start us out with so many imperfections and moral weaknesses and in a context in which our wills are already in bondage to sin? Why bring us into being as sinners and then go to the trouble of saving us from our sin? Why not simply bypass all the misery and suffering along the way and bring us into being as perfected saints in the first place? Or, as you have put it yourself: If “God could have made us and prevented our sinning … why would God not just make us with dispositions such that we always had the maximum freedom to act obediently?”

The assumption behind such questions–as again you are fully aware–is that, if he so desired, God could have created each of us (or perhaps a different set of persons) instantaneously as self-aware, language using, fully rational, and morally mature individuals who are from the beginning perfectly fit for intimacy with God. But why suppose that to be metaphysically possible at all? Why suppose that God could instantaneously create an individual center of consciousness that is aware of itself as distinct from God, distinct from its environment, and distinct from other persons? For my own part, I seriously doubt that God could have created any persons at all without satisfying certain metaphysically necessary conditions of their coming into being, and the most important of these would be “an initial separation from God,” which in the above mentioned article I describe in the following way:

So if God had no choice, provided he wanted to create any persons at all, “but to permit their embryonic minds to emerge and to begin functioning on their own in a context of ambiguity, ignorance, and indeterminism,” then the creation of a person is, of necessity, a much more complicated and time-consuming process, even for an omnipotent being, than one might have imagined. And if the required context is one that virtually guarantees erroneous judgments and misguided choices (perhaps even an initial bondage of the will to sin, as Paul understood it), then God faces the following dilemma in creation: Some of the very conditions essential to our emergence as rational individuals distinct from God are themselves obstacles to perfect fellowship (or union) with him, and these cannot be overcome until after we have already emerged as a center of consciousness distinct from God’s own consciousness.

Such thoughts, of course, merely echo your own answer to the question of why God did not start us out in a perfected state. For as you have written above: “I’m inclined to believe it has something to do with the process of ourselves being first separated, or ‘ejected’ as Lewis said, from God and subsequently being united to him.” In several places I have called this process “creation in two stages.” The first stage is one in which we emerge as minimally rational agents distinct from God in a context of ambiguity, ignorance, and indeterminism; the second is one in which God gradually overcomes these obstacles to reunion with him, which are also obstacles to a fully realized freedom, and perfects us as his sons and daughters.

As I see it, therefore, some of the very metaphysical conditions that make a power of contrary choice possible in the first place–the ambiguity, the ignorance, and the indeterminism–are also obstacles to a fully realized freedom. And I’ll try to provide a clear illustration of this point in a subsequent post.

Thanks for your insights.

-Tom

#102

I read this paper about a year ago and it was very helpful and strongly influenced thinking.

The conundrum I have about this two-stage process of development into the “glorious freedom of the children of God”, to quote Paul, is that it seems it must be a developmental process. So what of those persons who are unable, for whatever reason, to go through any development into personhood at all in this lifetime (infants, the brain-damaged or severely mentally handi-capped) and are never able to undergo this “metaphysically necessary” process. Do you have any thoughts on this?

Perhaps this question is a mystery and just “above our pay-grade”. One possibility my brain has entertained includes reincarnation, which makes sense with this model, but I’m hesistant to embrace because it does not seem very biblical. Another could be that in the ages to come there, there is, even for those who have never sinnned (infants, the brain-damaged or severely mentally handi-capped) a purgatorial process that continues (as I think many of us here already believe exists for many people) that completes this process of transformation into personhood.

#103

I echo your post, Caleb. And I love this conversation :smiley: .

While we are ostensibly talking about ‘free will’, the direction the thread has taken means that we are now also cracking open, only somewhat tangentially, the toughest theological nut of all - theodicy.

I reckon that, at bottom, all serious objections to the Christian faith are predicated on the same basic question: if, as Christians believe He is, God is both omnipotent and omnibenevolent, and hence could have actualised any logically possible world, why did He he actualise this particular one, with all its inherent cruelty, pain and suffering? There seems to be a strong presumption among those who either deny or doubt the existence of God that somehow He must have been able to do better than He has in creating the world. (As Peter Cook once pithily remarked, “I wouldn’t have put in cancer if I’d invented the Universe; I’d have left that out”.)

And I reckon this thread is going about as near to providing an answer to that question as we are ever going to get this side of the veil :smiley: . But like Caleb, I do wonder about how this ‘developmental paradigm’ works for those who die in infancy, or whose brains don’t work sufficiently well for them to be properly self-aware.

Cheers

Johnny

#104

Hi Tom:

This is truly a fascinating thread and I greatly appreciate your guidance in the discussions.

However, it’s doubly challenging because I’m trying really hard to A) understand the position of everyone here and B) understand how to incorporate everyones views into my own. Deciding which are major differences, which are minor. (General thanks to all participating here!)

In your very introductory post, you said this:

I was wondering if perhaps such a summary might be helpful about now??
Further, you also noted that we must be honest and fair enough to speak of freedom in ways that even our Arminian Free Will theist friends would agree with (is that a correct understanding of what you said?) so I’d wonder how we are doing on that score as well…

A few random, related thoughts…

I’m glad you are referring to our origins and initials conditions of moral development etc (though not specifically about the “persons” – if they were actual persons – of Adam and Eve). But I must note that one huge barrier to discussing all this with Free Will Arminians (at least in my little world!) has been their insistence that Adam and Eve were fully free, fully informed, fully rational beings who just had all that implanted in them from the get-go. (ironic that they don’t consider this to be determinism!!) That they sinned “proves” they had the capacity to make the contrary choice. However, this gets really impossible because we envision ourselves as, eventually, achieving (or arriving at) those very same things Adam and Eve supposedly had! (ie fully free, fully informed, fully rational) and yet living for eternity without sin! Which must mean that Adam and Eve were not quite as free, or informed, or rational as had been heretofore thought… (I’m hearing you - and others - say/suggest that freedom, rationality, are simply not things that can be implanted; for that really would be true determinism…)

Also, it seems to me many of us have in mind a certain “red line” that God must not cross in order to avoid the charge of being deterministic. (ie a “red line” God has imposed on Himself…)
Perhaps, for example:

God may:
– cause us to be aware of certain things…
– manipulate our circumstances to teach us cause/effect/consequences
– cause us to understand our inner needs for love, belonging, community, etc

God may not:
– instantaneously implant experience, knowledge, context…
– “program” our software (minds) to guarantee certain responses
– render us “non-other” ie we will always be the creation…

Lastly, it troubles me just a bit that Arminians might just accuse us of simply redefining freedom as that thing necessary for us to always do the right thing. Which kind of destroys their ability to claim that hell is freely chosen – since it’s clearly not the “right thing”. Which means that one must have and use his freedom to loose his freedom… and I’m not sure I want to go down that rabbit hole!!

Thanks again everyone…

Bobx3

#105

Hi Tom,
Thanks again for guiding this discussion. I read your paper again and realize the point I’ve been stuck on (the power of contrary choice) appears to be consistent with but not necessary for the two stage process you describe.

The bolded portion is what I’ve been arguing for (both good and bad choices, however.) So it appears that I am not a determinist as I do grant that we as creatures did not emerge in a fully deterministic context. :smiley: And I was obtuse enough to miss the point of being as fair as possible to free-will theists. :frowning: I do look forward to hearing what the power of contrary choice (at least for “bad” choices) adds from a theological or philosophical standpoint other than the idea of “blame” or moral culpability.

#106

I’m starting to think that, at best, either ‘side’ can do no more than justify its position on the matter; 1) give a reasonable, empirical account of human intentional behavior, and 2) yet do justice to truths deduced from scripture.

  1. In other words, looking at behavior only, with no theory beforehand, we can, I believe, see the determining factors in how people make choices and direct their lives. We can see the effects of nature and nurture as determining certain large areas of the personality.
    Then, if we go on to ask, concerning what we have observed - what do these facts (I use the word ‘facts’ advisedly) teach us about Free Will? - we are already in conceptual difficulty, because we are at least implicitly considering an abstract concept - FW - to be a real thing, rather than what it is, which is a “theory-in-a-word” that we lay, like a grid, over observed behaviors to explain them to our satisfaction.
    So I contend that “FW” is explanatory only, and is freighted with meanings imported from elsewhere than empirical observation. That does not mean the concept is wrong; it does mean that imposing the concept is a matter of choice, a chosen method of interpretation, and as such needs to be justified.

  2. If on the other hand we start with an anthropology deduced from scripture AND a concept of Providence deduced from scripture, I think we get a very interesting picture of man’s ‘will’. It appears that divine demands and enticements do entail that people CAN choose. (Whether the choice is ‘free’ is, of course, the bone of contention).
    In addition to the entailment that people CAN choose, in response to what God asks or demands from them, we are also faced with God’s providential activity; whatever we mean by THAT, at a minimum we mean that God acts in the world, changes things and people, guides situations etc. So we can make choices, according to the Bible (leaving ‘free’ aside for the nonce) but those choices are made in a world - a natural world and a social world - created, bounded, guided - by God.
    We also know, from scripture, that we are not ‘free’ to will certain things, such as our salvation, unless God gives us the gift. That point has been sufficiently made upthread by Kate, if I remember correctly.

I think the controversy is about the adjective ‘free’. That throws the whole discussion into an ‘either completely free’ or “Not free” contest of words and definitions, doesn’t it? What if we just came up with a statement, such as this one I just made up:

“We believe that people have the ability to choose, because they are made in God’s image AND God has asked for and demanded certain choices from people; and also because we observe human intentional activity and have decided to call certain behaviors ‘choosing’, or ‘the exercise of will’ or 'freedom of choice” - concepts we use as handy conventions, not as necessary metaphysical ‘truths’.
We also believe that human choices are limited, or enlarged, by nature and nurture, both being aspects of God’s Providence. In certain special cases, mankind is not ‘free’ at all, as in the biblical teachings we call ‘soteriology.’
All this to say, that mankind inhabits ‘middle-earth’ - between earth and heaven, between the future freedom of the sons and daughters of God, and the abysmal determinism brought about by sin. “Freedom” in middle-earth is a mixture; someday it will be pure."

Something like that anyway. I don’t expect a lot of agreement on this, because I may be missing the whole point of the thread, which is not unusual for me :laughing: .

edited to correct grammar and spelling.

#107

Dave! Middle Earth – Is that what Tolkien meant? How silly of me not to see. :confused: But Middle Earth seems so much more, well, magical – maybe I’m missing something here . . . hmm. (Don’t want to derail the thread, but yeah – thanks.)

#108

You raise a good question, Caleb, about infants, the severely brain damaged, and all of those who never complete the first stage of creation–that is, who never become minimally rational agents–before the time of their physical death. But I guess my question would be: Why suppose that all further development for them will cease at the moment of their physical death? Are we to suppose, for example, that God will instantaneously transform an aborted fetus or, if you prefer, a child who dies naturally at birth into a perfected son or daughter with a fully realized freedom? For my own part, I’m not so sure that this is even possible. When we consider the bad character of such notorious individuals as a Hitler, or a Stalin, or even a Tom Talbott :laughing: , we have little trouble imagining that God may still have important work to do with them after they have died. So why think it any different in the case of those who have not yet even developed a character?

Because God has all of eternity and perhaps also infinitely many realms with which to work, he presumably has no need to act in a rushed way as if his plans for his children had a built in time limit.

Thanks for your question, Caleb.

-Tom

Note: This is a first for me. It is the first time in my entire life that I have ever used an emoticon in one of my own posts.

#109

Good for you, Tom! Loosening up is of GOD! :wink:

If the various undeveloped humans are to continue their development in the next age, does that mean they’ll have challenges and suffering and confusion and want and etc.? I hope not, but I wonder how it’s possible to develop character without going through hardship?

#110

Cindy - I was just using ‘middle-earth’ as a metaphor of sorts. :smiley:

#111

I think these are very insightful comments, Bob, and I no doubt believe this because I agree with everything you say here. [Hee. Hee. By the way, Cindy, this is one way that I sometimes avoid using emoticons!] When discussing such matters with traditional Christians, therefore, whether they be Arminian or Calvinist, my only practical option, it seems, is to challenge the traditional understanding of the Adam and Eve story, which in my opinion is both philosophically confused and exegetically untenable. In particular, I reject the widespread assumption that, according to the account in Genesis, our first parents fell from a higher or more perfect state to a lower one. And even though St. Augustine clearly held such a view and thus influenced the tradition powerfully, the early church father St Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons between roughly 177 and 202 A.D., held a very different and, as I see it, much more accurate view. I discuss these matters in the afore-mentioned paper at the following URL:

willamette.edu/~ttalbott/Determinism.pdf

And here are a couple of paragraphs from that paper:

So you are quite right, Bob. I see nothing in the story of Adam and Eve, as we encounter it in Genesis 3, that would justify the widespread assumption that our first parents were any more perfect or any less prone to missing the mark than were their descendants; and neither do I see any reason to suppose, therefore, that their first sin was any less inevitable, given the context of ambiguity, ignorance, and misperception in which it occurred, than are the initial sins of their descendants.

-Tom

#112

.

#113

Tom; thanks for bringing that up. I have read that view as well, and it makes a lot of sense to me, particularly if we are to view Adam as primarily a theologically representative character. In other words, the same things that are true of Adam are true of all of us, since he represents all of mankind. (Regardless of whether he was an actual historical individual).

#114

.

#115

I concluded a recent post with these words:

Simple ignorance provides a clear illustration of the kind I had in mind. If we were created with a full and complete knowledge of God, that knowledge would not be a personal discovery at all. It would not be acquired through a complex learning process in which we formulate hypotheses, test them in our own experience, and then learn for ourselves over time why union with God is bliss and separation from him an objective horror; nor would it require a complex process in which we choose freely, experience the consequences of our choices, and then learn from these consequences why love and forgiveness are likewise better than selfishness and estrangement. Herein lies the truth, I believe, behind the freewill theist’s contention that our freedom in relation to God requires that we start out in a context where God remains hidden from us, at least for a season. For who could both discern accurately God’s loving nature, his desire to satisfy our own deepest yearnings and desires, and, at the same time, freely choose to reject such a God? Apart from some degree of ignorance, it seems, we would have no power to reject the true God at all and hence no power of contrary choice in this matter.

But consider also how relative degrees of ignorance can severely restrict our freedom and, in that sense, can become an obstacle to a fully realized freedom. If I am ignorant of the fact that someone has laced the local water supply with LSD, then I have not freely chosen to ingest the LSD, however freely I may have chosen to drink the water. And similarly for the freewill theist’s understanding of divine hiddenness: Insofar as the ambiguities, the ignorance, and the misperceptions in a given set of circumstances conceal God from us, or at least make unbelief a reasonable option, they also make committing ourselves to God in these circumstances more like a blind leap in the dark than a free choice for which we are morally responsible. So if anything, God’s hiddenness can render us less rather than more responsible for our failure to love the One whose true nature and very existence remain hidden from us. Indeed, insofar as we remain ignorant of God’s loving nature, we are in no position to reject anything but a caricature of God, and that is a far cry from rejecting the true God himself.

So the very ignorance that makes a power of contrary choice possible in our relationship to God is also an obstacle to a fully realized freedom in our relation to God.

Any thoughts?

-Tom

#116

.

#117

In a recent post, Bob3 noted that at the beginning of this discussion I expressed my intention to provide an occasional summary of its progress. He then asked whether “such a summary might be helpful about now.”

The answer is that such a summary seems essential at this point if we are to keep the discussion properly focused, and I have indeed started working on one. But it has proved to be more of a challenge than I had originally expected, in part because these discussions have a natural tendency to become more and more diffuse as they proceed. Still, I intend to present my own summary as soon as I’m satisfied with it, and I invite anyone else who might be so inclined to put forth a summary from your own point of view even as I shall do the same from my point of view. After that, I will come clean and give a full explanation of how I now understand the concept of freedom.

My thanks again to all who have contributed to the discussion.

-Tom

#118

.

#119

Hi Tom, this is an important topic for me but not my current project. I hope to develop these ideas in the near future.

A couple undeveloped thoughts:

Assuming a created agent can make free will decisions does not necessitate the assumption that a created free will agent can make irrevocable decisions.

Also, most Arminians believe that an unsaved human can reject God multiple times and finally accept God’s love as long as the acceptance occurs before the boundary of permanent biological death. This appears arbitrary to me.

Thank you for discussing this important topic.

#120

Here is a quick summary of my views.

I think God has made the universe such that there is genuine libertarian freedom. This involved him limiting his omnipotence and entering into time. He is, I also believe, always exerting a “thwartable influence” towards his rational creatures. As MacDonald said somewhere: God threw us off himself and gave us room to be. This epistemic space or distance is what makes freedom (and therefore sin) possible. I do not think sin amounts simple ignorance, for that would equate it to the same thing as mistake in doing a math problem or a mere “misunderstanding”. My experience with sin is that there is a deliberate consent to an act which we in some sense *know *is wrong.

I think God, before he created the universe, established the parameters in which free agents could act. (He therefore knew all the consequences of what would happen if, so to speak.) Once that was established, he then created, and agreed to “stand back” from these agents in such a way that his interacting with both the universe and individuals was conditioned and dependent on the creation itself. (Jesus was at times *unable *to do miracles.) I therefore think that in order to be free, there must be *determined *consequences for free acts. In other words, God set up the world such that certain effects would always follow from certain causes. Many of the causes, however, he left up to free agents. The reason God did this – instead of determining every cause – is because without it personhood is destroyed and God would not really have separate, live, individual beings with whom to relate and bring into perfection. The creatures themselves would not participate or be themselves the live centers and causes of Good that God wants them to be.

Thus I do not think every act of every free agent is always free. I think consequences of free acts can indeed lead to other acts which are *determined *and *not *similarly free. Free acts then can, paradoxically, restrict freedom. This can happen in regard to oneself (e.g. the alcoholic) and another (the abusive father who causes his son to have strong feelings of hatred or later psycho-social problems.) The opposite way is also true: free acts can build us and others into more compatibilistically loving, patient, courageous etc. individuals. All this really equates to is the fact that we can influence and definitvely effect ourselves and others by our free choices. (This is the foundation for my belief in a literal fall of angels and humans.)

This theory involves a very nuanced definition of sin, which I believe can only be an act involving *consent *to something one believes is wrong. Thus feelings, desires, and temptations are not themselves sins, though they may lead to them. Again, I think the conditions (the ambiguity or epistemic space) that allow for sin are such that what is presented to the intellect does not determine the will; though I do think one still “knows” that act a is right and b is wrong.

All evil, pain, suffering, and anything “bad”, I believe, is ultimately the result of sin from some created being. I do not think good is dependent on evil, so I do not think that evil or pain or sin were necessary parts of creation. If we suppose, as some have suggested (at times even myself), that in order to fully enjoy good we must experience evil, then many absurd consequences follow (metaphysical dualism, God being the author of evil, rejection of simultaneous omnipotence and omnibenevolence, destroying the distinction between good and evil, destroying our notions of guilt and responsibility, destroying personhood, denying our inescapable and patently true experience of freedom, denying that God is presonal, creating a division within the will of God.)

I do not believe evil exists in order to bring about a higher, otherwise unattainable good. An all-good omnipotent God does not “need’ evil in his creation to achieve his desired good end. Metaphysically speaking, good does not need evil to be, though the opposite is true. And who would dare say the human race has “needed” such things as the Holocaust, slavery, parapaligia, the destruction of families, betrayal and infidelity? What wife needs her husband to beat her, sleep with another woman, or degrade her for her to experience maximal happiness? What child needs to be sexually molested? What parent needs to lose her child? If such was the case, would not all our efforts to stop violence and evil and suffering actually be counterproductive? In short, I think the whole notion is absurd, and stems from an inproper understanding of God’s perfection and the metaphysical notion of the Good. But such is the necessary consequence for saying evil “had to be” or sin is a “necessary” part of the outflowing of a metaphysically perfect, personal being who is Love essential.

Even though I don’t think evil is necessary for good, I do think – due to his omnipotence – God can bring good out of evil, however horrendous. All of nature and experience attest to the fact that life can come from death. And I do not think God would have brought us into being if it was possible for evil to ultimately prevail for even a single soul or part of his creation. From a metaphysical perspective, pure evil cannot exist, so there is never a point in which a rational being is “solidified” in evil. This is what gives me the hope of universal reconciliation and perfection.

I think the belief I’ve outlined above goes a long way in providing a grid that makes sense of many teachings of Christianity, Scripture, the Problem of Evil, and Universalism.