(Untitled)

[jeffyhasspasms]

So, this is a talk my friend Mike and I had just a few moments ago in reference to my last post. It all started in regards to the question, "If God made us to love him, but in out arrogance we turned away, and God knew we'd be arrogant, how can he be disgusted and mad with us?" I'm going to post the transcript up here, we'd love to get some input

Comments

[katalaya]

What excellent breakfast reading/thinking this has been. I really like that quote you put in.

I think the choice involved is one of the most beautiful things about Christianity.

In human behavior, not doing something or not making a decision is still a choice. The standards and rules of human behavior might not really be the same for how God's works though.

[illimitably]

I've actually written a couple related papers on determinism and the conception of God as a personal, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent being. Philosophy of religion and philosophy of mind are the areas of philosohpy that interest me most. Anyway, I have to go to class now, but I'll post some more later.

[illimitably]

I can send you the full versions of some stuff I've written (they're short papers), but here's a condensed version of an interesting problem related to free will

[illimitably]

*would-be murderer

[jeffyhasspasms]

That's a hard thing to discuss because, to define God as "perfectly good" first we need to have a grasp of good in the sense that it would apply to God. A parent who allows his child to learn from their mistakes as opposed to sheltering them at every turn is in fact a "good parent" but some of the things that happen to the child aren't good and to the child, at that point in time, the parent doesn't seem good.

[illimitably]

So, are you saying that it might not be that a perfectly good being would intervene immediately after a sinful choice were made? In the above scenario, though, it's still possible for people to be punished for their choices, and to learn from them.

[musicman48858]

I question your premise that it would still be free will if everytime you made a bad choice, God intervened and stopped you from making said choice. Because, while maybe that would work once or twice, after a while, you would know God was going to intervene, therefore your choice would be altered, and therefore no longer free. Nobody who decides to murder somebody would try it if they knew that the victim would be alive to identify them. Therefore, they no longer have a free choice to commit murder, because murder is now out of the question, because they know that they cannot succeed and will undoubtedly be caught, regardless of any other circumstances.

Freewill requires complete freedom of choice, which requires that ALL consequenses of your actions take place. In this particular case, one of the required consequenses of murder is that somebody is dead. If nobody is dead because God intervened, then that particular consequence did not take place, and therefore that person cannot experience the full consequence of their actions.

[illimitably]

oops I meant to reply to your comment but instead posted a new one

[illimitably]

Some conceptions of free will require only that your choice be morally worthy; that is, worthy of praise or blame. The choice to murder, even if no one ends up dead, is made freely if the agent can be blamed for the choice. Which, of course, he can be in the above case. If you're worried about conditioning, then build into the scenario that no one knows that the murder he's about to commit will be prevented from happening, even if he has experienced prevented murders in the past. He forgets, or is prevented from committing it to memory, or by some other mechanism never knows that his actions will not happen.

[musicman48858]

So now we're in a situation where God makes it so that you can't know the potential consequences of your actions? If you don't know the consequence is coming, then you surely can't make an informed decision about whether or not to commit an action, thereby not having fully free choice in the matter.

[illimitably]

When do we ever know all the potential consequences of our actions? Unintended harm from our actions happens all the time. But we're not likely to say that we don't choose freely in everday life, just because we don't know beforehand all the consequences that will come of our actions. And remember, on some conceptions of free will (and of course there is debate about what exactly free will is, which complicates our discussion, because it seems that we need to agree on a view of free will), informed decisions (in the sense that I take you to be using "informed") are not what constitute free will. Consider the case of someone who strongly believes that he will (say) cause his sister great pain by stealing her toys, and he steals her toys anyway. Now suppose his sister isn't hurt, but instead laughs and thinks it's funny. He certainly didn't know that that consequence was coming, but we wouldn't say that he didn't choose freely because he lacked knowledge of it. In fact, we'd hold him responsible for committing an action which he

[musicman48858]

Ahh, yes, however. This was not a situation where the individual did not know of the consequenses, but rather one where he could not know of his consequenses. People jump into decisions without knowing the possible results on a daily basis. But people have the ability, given the desire, to fully research all the possible consequenses of their actions before they act. Your hypothetical boy could have asked his sister what she would do if he stole her toys. The "free will" situation you have created is a situation where God has removed the ability to comprehend the potential consequense. Therefore, that particular choice is not really open to him at all, because he can't make a completely free choice.