If man's will is free and yet not divorced from his nature then does it make sense to assert a free will. I think the answer is yes. The reason why is that we must distinguish between the ability to exercise our will and the actual exercising thereof. That we have the ability to freely choose left or right, up or down, red or blue paint is undeniable, but the choosing of left or right, up or down and blue or red paint is not free in the sense that it is not divorced from our preference toward those things. A man who likes blue more than red will freely choose blue paint while the person who prefers red will freely choose red. A person who is in a hurry to reach their destination may turn left at the intersection while the person who enjoys country drives will turn right in stead. What is the difference? Preference.

Johnathan Edwards said that a man will do that toward which he is most inclined. That is a person will turn left not because they are compelled to but because they want to. A person will choose blue paint for the same reason. It is also true that a person will go to work each day, even if he dislikes his job because he enjoys having heat, a roof over his head and food in the fridge more than he hates his job. He goes to work because he prefers to. It is a pleasure pain, risk reward, preferential choosing which all of us make thousands of times each day without thought or need of thought.

That is why our will seems capricious even to us. We make decisions so fast and with little to no examination of the self that very often those decisions seem to be random, but they are not. In fact it is the job of behavioral therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists to do this close examination of our wills and motives which we, if we were willing and honest enough, could do on our own. We are not honest however and thus do need others to help us in this sort of examination. However the very existence of twelve step programs, accountability groups etc I think proves that this sort of examination need not be done by trained professional in most cases, but by people who have shared experiences and are open and honest enough to help each other out. The reason why is that there is not some sort of great magical power at work in such things, but the examination of motive and desire which is common to us all in general if not in the specifics. That is why the Priest will heartily say that confession is not for God, but for the confessor. For the truly penitent will examine his own heart in so doing and find in himself the reasons for his sin.

So it is our volition that is free, but the exercising of that volition is constrained by our natures. That is why knowledge, nature and desire shape our decisions because all that we do we do by choice, but not by a will which is neutral.

I want to take one second here to digress. I have spoken to many who believe that any and all decisions are random. That the will is only free if it is also divorced from all influence. However I think such an assertion is ridiculous given the fact that all men are a composite of all they have been, seen and done. No one is free from his past and neither is he free from his inclinations and therefore to say that free will is random is to assert uncaused effects. Our will is free and yet it is determined, but that determination is one of self determination and not from the divine puppet master in the sky.

So in our choosing of daily mundane things we find ourselves over and over again doing things which seem to us to be random, and yet if we could fully break down our motives, desires etc we would find that the exercising of our will is the result of direct causal links which are born out of our knowledge, experience and nature.

So how does this apply in the question of a Sovereign God who overrules our self determination?

More on that later.

Just Thinking

A Question

Is it rational to assert a truly free will while also asserting a sovereign God?

I guess the answer would depend on another question, what does 'truly free will' mean? So lets define some terms.

truly: in agreement with fact.

free: (1) not determined by anything beyond its own nature or being (2) having a scope not restricted by qualification (3) not obstructed, restricted, or impeded (4) not united with, attached to, combined with, or mixed with something else.

will: (1) used to express desire, choice, willingness, consent, or in negative constructions refusal (2) used to express determination, insistence, persistence, or willfulness

free will: : (1) voluntary choice or decision (2) freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention

To start with I think we can use the word 'actually' in place of truly since to define truly free will as a free will which agrees with fact while questioning whether such a will actually exists would seem strange. To that end I think instead I will say "actually free will", as in is the will of men actually free?

Then we get into the words 'free' and 'will' which is where the whole thing gets sticky. To start with, if we use the dictionary definition then we come up with (by combining) ideas such as; a desire determined by its own nature, or an unrestricted determination, or an unobstructed willingness, or even an unmixed persistence. So clearly the idea is somewhat vague. I think therefore we need to consider what free will is not before tangling what it is.

To begin with I do not think that we can define free will as an unrestricted, uninhibited, unattached volition because all of us have a preexisting determinate factor in the exercise of our free will, namely ourselves. All of us exercise our wills within the scope of our own experiences, memories, knowledge and desires and while these are universal in general they are not so in particular.

For example an adult which knows that the cooking surface on a griddle is hot is not the least bit curious to know exactly how hot said surface is, or at least is not open to testing the hotness of the cooking surface with the old bare hand on hot metal method. A child however, who may have never before applied the bare hand on hot metal method, may be curious to touch the surface and therefore will exercise his will in an entirely different direction from the adult. What is the difference? Knowledge. The Adult knows right well the surface is hot and therefore will not touch it, the child knows nothing of the sort, or at least does not understand experientially what "hot" means and therefore touches the cook surface. Once. Armed with this new knowledge the child will not soon exercise his will in that direction again.

If we accept this example, then I think it can be fairly asserted that the exercise of our will is affected by our knowledge and therefore knowledge acts as a determinate factor in how we exercise our will, and therefore our will is not truly free.

But one may argue the will is still free, as in the ability to decide is free, but knowledge helps to determine which course of action will be decided upon without actually affecting the faculty to choose.

I think that is true, but there are factors involved in the choosing as well. Our criminal system recognizes, for example, that certain people who commit crimes do not have equal liability with others who have committed the same crime because of metal faculties. The courts have recognized that the exercise of the will can be affected by the ability of the person to choose according to knowledge, experience etc. The same holds true in other ways. A small child who hits another small child will not be punished severely, but a teen who strikes a small child will have long ramifications to face for such an action. The culpability in exercising the will rests in the ability to understand consequences etc of making those decisions, and therefore the actual choosing itself, while free, is not free from the nature of the chooser.

I think this is a very important idea to grasp as it will color the discussion greatly (after all this is what I believe) that is the exercising of our will, even if the ability to decide is free, is not divorced from our natures. An aggressive person and a timid person will not react in identical fashions to similar situations. Neither will a brave man and a cowardly man react the same. The ingrained nature of a person will radically affect how that person will exercise their will, and while the decision making is free, the decisions being made do not simply appear out of the ether, but rather are the result of the nature, knowledge, etc of the one choosing the course of action.

But one may argue that the nature of a person may be formed of that person's past experience and thus it is not nature but nurture which leads to decisions 'x', 'y' or 'z'.

Again I think that is true in so far as it goes, and I also think it proves my point. First off I think we should be careful in ascribing causal power to nurture apart from nature. For example I have read various psychological profiles in self help books (btw most of these are hysterically funny) which argue that one sort of thing (like a distant uninvolved parent for example) leads to mutually exclusive behaviors in study subjects. The strange thing is that these authors are arguing that a distant parent causes both (again a non-specific example) promiscuous behavior as well as distant unattached marriage relationships between spouses, and to argue that one factor caused both contradictory behaviors is very problematic. Even in cases where nurture and nature being combined are supposed to indicate future behavior, such as alcoholic parents and the potential genetic predisposition to the children as a result, has been shown to produce both alcoholic children and children who never touch a drop. The difference is not found in the contributing nurture of the person, but in the exercise of the will and how that person chooses to live. The point is that observation of behavioral patterns can lead to contradictory findings because the natures of people are not identical and therefore the way which people respond to situations is not identical either. The contradiction is readily explained in that the childhood situation is not the cause of the behavior of the persons in question, but that the nature of the persons in question is the cause of how they have reacted to the situation.

How do I know? Because a single cause cannot produce contradictory effects. While it is true that various contributing factors in a causal chain may produce apparent contradictory effects, it is those factors which act in a causal fashion to produce the effects in question. For example, two men jump off of a cliff, one falls until achieving terminal velocity and meets the ground with a sudden bone shattering stop while the other floats off into the sky and disappears over the horizon. What is the difference? One man leaped from the edge without anything to arrest his fall and the other leaped with a hang glider. Did gravity produce apparently opposite results? No. Rather the contributing factors of hang glider and no hang glider affected the causal chain of gravity (what goes up will come down) to produce different results.

In the same way, while nurture does affect the fashion in which we exercise our wills, I think it is our nature which acts in a greater, and therefore determinative fashion.

For these reasons, I think that "free will" is actually nothing of the sort, and that one need not believe that we have puppet strings sticking out of the tops of our heads for this to be so. In fact I do not think one needs to assert the existence of a "god" at all for this to be so. One could argue that our free wills are determined by experience and chemical make up in our brains completely apart from any sort of belief in any sort of creator or endower of free will. Obviously I do believe in a Creator, but the mere existence of mental faculties is not a proof that such a Creator exists actually in any fashion whatever.

So, this one is getting long so I'll quit now, I do not think the will is free in the sense that it is divorced from any and all contributing factors to it. But rather that the exercising of our will is shaped and caused by our own experience, knowledge and inclinations/ natures, and as such cannot be said to be free in this sense.

However, I do believe the will, within our constituent natures, is free and I will try to explain why later.

Just Thinking.

Part II

Strangely enough I just commented on this on another post.

The question is, how can God ordain wickedness to be and still be good?

We must first understand that we are people who are surprised by suffering. It is not when things go as planned tht we shake our hands at Heaven and yell, "How could You let this happen to me?" I have never seen a man in the midst of his happiness shrug his shoulders and say, "I just don't understand why this thing is happening to me at this time." No father holding his new healthy child next to his smiling wife has ever said, "Why! Why oh God why?" It never happens. And the reason is that we are so accustomed to blessedness that we take it for granted.

Think about it.

Most people get up everyday, go to work, come home safely to their residence and family and friends, and it never once crosses their minds that they have just received a level of gracious blessedness which boggles the mind if meditated on for even a second. First off the complex systems of the body have worked in cohesion for another day without flaw. The sun has not lashed out a solar flare which burned off our ozone and radiation layers and killed us. We have managed to drive our vehicles, which lets face it something close to none of us do safely and without distraction, to our places of work and not been killed or killed someone else. We have a job which even in a bad economy something like 90% of us still do. We have come home safe and sound to our family and friends. We have family and friends who have not been killed during the day. We are tiny little creatures on a tiny rock sheltered from the cold blackness of space by a layer of air so thin that it laughable even on a geologic scale and forget a solar, galactic, universal scale. We assume the basic goodness of life every second of every day, and this is true even in more impoverished an even subsistence countries. Even in lands where poverty is crushing and life is bleak joy is found. If it were not so the people who suffer in tsunamis, earth quakes, hurricanes, fires, etc would not stand in the ash heap appalled at what has happened to their even meager possessions. The fact is we live in a measure of grace which is mind boggling and never think to look to the One who has shown such beneficence toward us.

And we need no further proof of this than the simple fact that we are daily surprised by suffering. How it must gall our Creator to see us impassively presuming on His mercy day by day and then daring to accuse Him when we hurt. It is truly the measure of our greedy selfish stupidity that we would dare do such a thing. We stand petty and spoiled in the face of the Almighty and assume that He owes us a hearing because he allowed our lives to break when the very measure of our brokenness is the grace which He has showered upon us unnoticed day upon year upon decade.

And so when we speak of evil and suffering we should do so in the care of remembering that we have received from His hand more grace than we can measure, and that our suffering lies not in His wicked intention and neither in His indifference, but in our own failing. For it is, at least in our cultural context, usually the poor decisions and misguided will of the sufferer which has led him into his own suffering. Of course I would never say that this is true of all peoples everywhere, but given our tendency to complain over minutia in our milieu I think it fair to say that most of that over which Americans suffer is directly related to our own failings and not God's. After all it is not God which causes us to live beyond our means (and yes I point the finger firmly at myself in all these things), over eat, laze about etc. These are bad decisions which lead to bad consequences which have nothing whatever to do with God somehow allowing us to suffer. For truly a man who smokes a pack of camels a day and eats a cheeseburger for lunch everyday need not be aghast when he comes up with hypertension, ulcers, high cholesterol and heart disease, that is cause and effect not God.

However, there are natural disasters, dictators, cruel evil men who victimize others for gain and sick pleasure and one need look further than the evening news to see all of this and more, and clearly for these to be God must allow them. The question is why?

First off I think we must look to Scripture. The Bible tells us that God intended for us to dwell in shalom, that is the perfect rest in which He resides in Himself. God intended for man to reside with Him and give Him glory in this perfect rest, and that the world has gone to Hell in a hand basket is laid firmly at man's decision to refuse this shalom and choose sovereignty for himself. It was this act of rebellion which invoked the curse of God on humanity and the world over which man was to rule. The reason the earth resists our attempts to control it rests in our initial rebellion against the God who gave us Creation over which to rule. Once we separated ourselves from His rule we also divorced ourselves from His shalom and cast ourselves into difficulty and suffering which was never intended for us.

And of course the question comes here, "But if God did not intend it then how could it have happened?" The answer lies in that we do have free will. This does not mean that we are morally neutral, but rather that the decisions which we make do not happen as a result of puppet strings sticking out the tops of our heads. St Augustine said that we are slaves to sin as a part of our constituent nature and that every action is affected by that nature, but that nature rests within our own hearts and not outside of us. So in effect the wicked desires in our hearts well up from within us as a part of our nature.

But didn't God give us this nature?

Yes and no. We are created in the image of God, but I think this image is our free will and the sovereignty intended for us by the Sovereign who gave it to us. That is Adam as the vice regent of the Creator was given the directive by God to obey and a nature unmarred by sin by which he was able to obey that directive. Included in this free will was God's promise of penalty should Adam choose to disobey. So God knows surely what Adam's course of action will be, God is able to prevent it and does not, and Adam is responsible for his own action and fall. As such while God ordains that Adam would fall, God does not cause Adam to fall. Why would a good God allow such a thing? I will not hazard to say I know but I think the answer lies in glory.

God wills that He receive glory. The greatest good in Creation is that God be glorified. We know this to be so in that we know that God glorifies Himself. However we must not think of God as some sort of cosmic egomaniac, but rather in His perfect holiness Go must seek His own glory. If God sought the glory of anything other than Himself then He would be giving glory to creature and not Creator, to do such a thing would make God an idolater and such a thought is intolerable. We could not assert that God is perfect and at the same time assert that God is an idolater.

So how would God get the glory in the Fall?

Let us assume that Adam had not fallen. In such a world, God would have given to Adam a place in paradise forever I think in like manner to that which the angels enjoy. That is at a certain point creatures become fixed in their way. Those who fall become permanently fallen at some point to never be redeemed, and those who reach glory do so forever. I think had Adam not fallen he would have experienced and ascension based on his own merit by which he would eventually have experienced a perfect relationship with God and thus would have glorified God for His work in Creation and relation with His creatures.

However, manifestly, Adam did fall. In his fall God received glory in that His judgment on His fallen creature is just. A just judge will always punish the guilty. And God received glory in that He took mercy on His fallen creatures. Remember that God had promised death for disobedience, but God delayed that judgment for a time and gave Adam the mercy to continue living, but in a fallen world righteously cursed by a holy Creator. So God, in the fall, is glorified in His judgment and mercy.

So how does this relate to us?

Well first off I think that fall is a literal historical event that is in some ways repeated in the lives of all of Adam's children. Given this belief then obviously the fall effects all of us. Also, we all experience a point where we commit Adam's sin. I have no idea how to quantify this event, when it happens, how it happens etc, but I am certain it does. The evidence of which is found in Romans 1 when the Apostle Paul tells us that all men see God in that He is manifest in His Creation, but that all men choose to not worship God but the creature and therefore are given over by God to his own sin. Adam ultimately chose to worship himself instead of God, and we do the same thing. I think the failings of greed, lust, strife, hate, murder etc all relate to this choice. All men choose to worship their own pleasure over the pleasure of worshiping and glorifying the God who made them.

But there is a second element to the fall. Adam did not fall alone, Creation was cursed because of him. God gave the world to Adam to subdue and fill and make all Creation as Eden was, and when Adam rebelled God cursed creation and caused it to resist us and bring us suffering. So when things like earth quakes occur somehow someway I think God is glorified. The reason I think this is because of relationship, that is what is true of the individual is also of the friend, family, household, neighborhood, city, state, country, world. So if it is true that I as an individual struggle against myself and my local surroundings then it should not be surprising that a large group of individuals would corporately struggle against themselves and their larger surroundings. And just as the individual can give God glory in the disasters which befall him by remembering God's great over arching beneficence toward him, so large populations can, in some more vague way, do the same thing. Also Scripture plainly tells us that the great tidal shifts in history are overseen by God for His own purposes. For example in 2Kings Syria bands with Israel to destroy Judah and Ahaz, King of Judah, seeks an alliance with Assyria to thwart this alliance. Assyria later destroys Israel and turns on Judah which leads Ahaz's son Hezekiah to seek an alliance with Babylon. Assyria is destroyed by miraculous intervention and Judah is saved only to later be destroyed by Babylon. Over all of this Scripture unflinchingly tells us God was working to bring His people to repentance, but the people did not repent and therefore further disaster befell them until finally they were destroyed altogether.

And now at long last the point.

When the towers fell in New York a great many people asked the Church, "Where was God?" Ironically most who asked this were seeking to blame a God in whom they professed unbelief for this disaster. The answer to the question is simple, God was in exactly the same place on September 11, 2001 as He was on September 10 and 12; in Heaven overruling history according to His own will for His own glory.

That so many people died should not come as a surprise to us. Everyone dies, thanks to Adam, and it is not unusual that people died in New York and Washington DC on that day. And we live in an evil world where people murder each other. Murder may be abhorrent, but it is hardly uncommon. In fact it is an expression of the wanton wickedness of the human heart which all of us have. Each of us capable of murder if we allow ourselves to be. I am sure that had those planes not crashed into those buildings and the field in Pennsylvania there would have been murders in New York and Washington DC that day, only we would not have heard about them. The reason why is that murder is terribly common in our culture. People are murdered all over our country everyday and we don't hear about it because we have accepted murder as the norm and not the catastrophe which it actually is. It never occurs to us, secure in our houses and lives, that all around us people are suffering and dying as a part of everyday life. We neither consider them nor pray for God's intervention over this horrible situation. Therefore I think it is possible (and please I am not presuming to know the mind of the Almighty I am only speculating to make a point) that God would allow such a disaster to befall us to get our attention that we are a murder soaked culture. It speaks more of our hard hearts that it takes mass murder to make us object to murder than it does to God's failure in allowing such a thing to happen.

Maybe God allowed all of those people to die to bring us to repentance as a nation that He may be glorified. Maybe God allowed it to be to remind us that we are fragile and running out of time.

One day the Headstone of History will be written and America will be found among the other names memorialized there. We are not eternal, and neither are we above God's Law, and that God would permit us to suffer in such a way is for our good and His glory that we may remember this and turn to Him who truly does offer security in the storm.

Let us glorify Him.

Just thinking.