On Wed, 05 Sep 2001 22:20:48 -0500 Tom Pearson <pearson@panam1.panam.edu>
writes:
>
> I would certainly support George Murphy's earlier comment today
> discouraging the tendency to oppose human freedom to divine freedom
> (although I'd be more than a "bit" wary of the idea). If human
> beings
> possess significant freedom (and I'm not convinced that they do), it
> does
> not follow that this would entail any particular consequence for
> divine
> freedom, as George pointed out.
>
> I'll say it right out loud: why are some folks so interested in
> cutting God
> down to a managable size? Why is there such an unwavering
> commitment to
> the primacy of a notion of will, both divine and human, and to the
> further
> notion of a "free" will, both divine and human, even if that
> commitment
> encourages an abandonment of the traditional and orthodox doctrine
> of God?
> I'd truly like to understand.
>
> Tom Pearson
Tom,
I don't get your rejection of human freedom, though it is certainly
limited. If I do not have free will, then I am either strictly determined
in all I do or else what I do is the product of accident or chance,
perhaps the result of quantum indeterminacy. If the former, then God
arbitrarily assigns me to heaven or hell (unless we adopt universalism,
and it doesn't matter whether we believe in Christ or not). If the
latter, it is similarly out of my hands, but it may be out of Gpd's
control, unless we return to the arbitrary with God playing dice.
As I see it, part of the problem with free will is that it is sometimes
confused with indeterminacy, which dumps us into the second alternative.
Human freedom is a form of determinism, but recognizes that choice is a
kind of causality, that is, self-determination. A second major problem is
that foreknowledge is confused with causation. If the deity is confined
to time, this appears necessary. But the Creator of space, time and
mass-energy must be outside of these restrictions, the First Cause rather
than part of the causal chain. Finally, we are so much tied to time that
it is very difficult to conceive of the divine timeless eternity. We keep
bootlegging temporality into it. Augustine seems to have recognized this
in his response to the question about what God was doing before he
created the world: "He was preparing hell for people who ask such
questions." A nonsense question got a snippy answer, probably more
effective than trying to explain that there was no before. Who was it
that remarked that it would be easier to endow a fool with wisdom than to
persuade him that he had none?
Dave
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