John: I believe Universalism above all cries out, “Love” and “God’s sovereignty, absolutely!” For the life of me I cannot understand how an honest reasoner cannot see this except by a forced ignorance and or an appointed lying spirit.
Tom: Dude, if anyone is ignorant of what you think is the right view on divine sovereignty, given your view their ignorance is the inevitable and unavoidable result of all antecedent states. Given your determinism, just what is it you’re astounded at? Per your view, John, reasoning has little to do with what we end up believing, since ‘reasoning’ itself doesn’t really share in determining beliefs in the sense required to justify our being astounded at what anybody believes. Everything that occurs follows in the great causal chain from preceding states of affairs.
I too see the grace and presence of God in all human beings. It’s overwhelming. I too am confident all will be reconciled to God. I too ground my confidence in the sovereign love and wisdom of God at work in all things, the inviolable logoi of created beings.
And when it comes to freedom, well, I share your astonishment. I’m as unable to understand how anybody cannot see that we are indeed libertarianly free as you are unable to see differently than you do.
Melchi: There are certainly various considerations in how the word ‘free’ is used in different contexts. I see the word “free” as generally referring to unconstrained and uninfluenced (by such things as hardening, blindness and illusions) with respect to choices, definitionally.
Tom: See it as you will. But you have to engage the actual beliefs and positions of other people regardless of what you prefer to see “true freedom” as. Problem is nobody actually believes we ever absolutely uninfluenced and unconditioned in the exercise of our wills.
Melchi: Well, as I think Aaron’s post above nicely demonstrates, that statement does not appear to be true.
Tom: No, Aaron didn’t demonstrate that anybody actually believes we are ever uninfluenced and absolutely unconditioned in the exercise of our wills. I saw Aaron ‘wondering’ and ‘questioning’ and ‘asking’, but I saw no demonstration of the incoherence of LFW. No libertarian thinks that libertarian free will means exercise one’s will in ways that are absolutely uninfluenced by anything at all.
Melchi: And there is a definition of free will out there (not necessarily libertarian) that requires that level of freedom for it actually to be considered free. Look up the words free and freewill in various dictionaries.
Tom: Save me the trouble. Provide me a couple names—theologians, philosophers, sociologist, anybody who believes such a notion of freedom. I’ll join you in arguing against them. That’s just the point here. It contributes nothing to my points or positions to argue that some belief I don’t hold to is false.
Melchi: You will find that there are definitions that maintain that to call something “free”, it must actually be free in every sense. People may not believe that we ever exercise that kind of freedom, but that’s what their arguments logically amount to.
Tom: Libertarian views on free will don’t logically entail a commitment to an absolute, unrestrained, unconditioned and uninfluenced exercise of the will. That’s just not the case my friend. There’s a huge literature on it and no way to drag it all in here, but Aaron will need to do much better if he wants to “demonstrate” that libertarian freewill is incoherent OR that it logically entails a commitment to absolutely uninfluenced and unconditioned volition, as you say.
Merry Christmas boys! Don’t spike the eggnog.
Tom
I am sure God looks different in these worlds however I would like to believe there is always Love associated with Deity. And possibly even Love, in higher dimensions than we can even imagine. For some reason the latter two statements rings true in my spirit, even though I have not thought of such before.