GOD does not have moral free will like human beings

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ChainBreaker said:
It’s not a false dilemma. You are correct that God is perfectly free. But he does not have moral free will like human beings. Please read the title of the thread.

But thanks for the link.
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Choosing evil is necessarily choosing limitation and reducing omnipotence and omniscience to a choice which opposes fullness of being. In other words, the dilemma you propose is one “on paper” or “in theory” only, but is ontologically meaningless.

Evil always involves degeneration or privation. Why would absolute free will (omniscient omnipotence) make a self-limiting choice to constrain itself? Just seems an odd claim that the capacity to choose evil would be a positive quality when it is just the opposite.

There is a reason why Jesus said that anyone who sins is a slave to sin. It is a general principle that evil makes even human wills less free, not morally more capable. The most free will is the most moral one.
 
ChainBreaker said:
Metaphysical fact states otherwise.
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You mean the fact that he can appear as an angel of light? He’s even appeared as Jesus to some saint(s). I’ve also seen one member’s tag line says “the devil will tell 1,000 truths to get you to fall for a single lie.”

Anyway, he is a creature and a devious one at that, I think Cena resolved that question for me earlier–he can do both but his aim is always towards evil.

I think the answer depends on how “moral free will” is defined… I already posted that God is bound by no one, I believe He has moral and any other kind of free will. The reason is He makes the rules, not us. Just as we can’t apply our determined “laws of physics” to the universe, we can only observe them; so it is with God.
 
ChainBreaker said:
  1. God is pure actuality.
  2. Love is identical to Gods nature, which is his existence, which is his intellect, which is his will, which is his law.
  3. It is metaphysically impossible for God to do that which is not identical to his nature as that would contradict the fact that he is pure actuality and therefore would imply potency in his nature.
Conclusion: God has no choice but to be Love for it is his nature to be so and it is his existence.
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God is perfectly free in all he does. If he were not free he would not be God. Love is an act of the will and God’s will is free.

Linus2nd
 
Saint Anselm addressed this point and concluded that the power to sin is not freedom. The underlying assumption, that the capacity to do otherwise is a necessary condition for freedom, is a false one. Rather, freedom of the will means that your actions are originated in yourself and not external powers.
 
TheSecondMile said:
Saint Anselm addressed this point and concluded that the power to sin is not freedom. The underlying assumption, that the capacity to do otherwise is a necessary condition for freedom, is a false one. Rather, freedom of the will means that your actions are originated in yourself and not external powers.
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You do realize that this conception of freedom negates the possibility of choosing without necessity?
 
TheSecondMile said:
What do you mean?
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If the possibility to act otherwise is not present, a free action cannot exist. Your action is necessitated beyond your power. If God cannot act in opposition to his restrictive nature, then his action is necessary.
 
blase6 said:
If the possibility to act otherwise is not present, a free action cannot exist. Your action is necessitated beyond your power. If God cannot act in opposition to his restrictive nature, then his action is necessary.
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I would agree with Saint Anselm that the capacity to act otherwise is not a necessary condition for freedom and that freedom, properly understood, means that your actions are originated in yourself and not external powers.

I don’t see how this implies that “your action is necessitated beyond your power.” On the contrary, it implies that your action is not determined by external powers, that was precisely the point.
 
TheSecondMile said:
I would agree with Saint Anselm that the capacity to act otherwise is a necessary condition for freedom and that freedom, properly understood, means that your actions are originated in yourself and not external powers.

I don’t see how this implies that “your action is necessitated beyond your power.” On the contrary, it implies that your action is not determined by external powers, that was precisely the point.
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That poster said that Saint Anselm disagreed with the notion that the capability of acting otherwise was a requisite for freedom.

If you only have one option, there is not a free choice. In the case of God, being perfect love, to act otherwise to perfect love is impossible. Thus God necessarily acts in some way perfectly loving. Maybe God can choose how to act in a perfectly loving way, but not against his nature.
 
blase6 said:
That poster said that Saint Anselm disagreed with the notion that the capability of acting otherwise was not a requisite for freedom.

If you only have one option, there is not a free choice. In the case of God, being perfect love, to act otherwise to perfect love is impossible. Thus God necessarily acts in some way perfectly loving. Maybe God can choose how to act in a perfectly loving way, but not against his nature.
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It was a typo that I have now corrected, my apologies.

I suppose we are at an impasse in our understanding of freedom. Is it your position that God is not in fact free because he cannot act in a way that is against his nature?
 
Peter_Plato said:
The power to create things worth creating would be, minimally, one aspect of freedom.
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What you define as freedom is in fact ill-defined. God either can impose some condition on creation, such as good creation, which means that he has to manipulate the situation, or not.
 
TheSecondMile said:
It was a typo that I have now corrected, my apologies.

I suppose we are at an impasse in our understanding of freedom. Is it your position that God is not in fact free because he cannot act in a way that is against his nature?
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Yes, that is close to right.

The Catechism does in fact state that God has free will. However, the nature of freedom is not explained intelligibly within the Catechism.

We can see that it is the nature of God to be infinitely loving. I think the choice to not create at all would be evil and against the nature of God, since evil is merely an absence of good. Therefore, we can rule out God having the choice to do evil or to not create anything. That leaves it to the fact that God must create some sort of good world. If you believe that God has to create the best possible universe, which is doubtful, then God has no free choice at all.

What no one may ever understand is why a perfect good would produce imperfect creation.
 
blase6 said:
Yes, that is close to right.

The Catechism does in fact state that God has free will. However, the nature of freedom is not explained intelligibly within the Catechism.

We can see that it is the nature of God to be infinitely loving. I think the choice to not create at all would be evil and against the nature of God, since evil is merely an absence of good. Therefore, we can rule out God having the choice to do evil or to not create anything. That leaves it to the fact that God must create some sort of good world. If you believe that God has to create the best possible universe, which is doubtful, then God has no free choice at all.

What no one may ever understand is why a perfect good would produce imperfect creation.
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Does this understanding of freedom also mean that we humans do not have free will because we also cannot act in a way that is contrary to our nature?
 
Peter_Plato said:
Choosing evil is necessarily choosing limitation and reducing omnipotence and omniscience to a choice which opposes fullness of being. In other words, the dilemma you propose is one “on paper” or “in theory” only, but is ontologically meaningless.

Evil always involves degeneration or privation. Why would absolute free will (omniscient omnipotence) make a self-limiting choice to constrain itself? Just seems an odd claim that the capacity to choose evil would be a positive quality when it is just the opposite.

There is a reason why Jesus said that anyone who sins is a slave to sin. It is a general principle that evil makes even human wills less free, not morally more capable. The most free will is the most moral one.
Click to expand...
I never claimed that “the capacity to choose evil would be a positive quality”. It seems odd to me that you found this claim in the OP.
 
Hodegetria said:
You mean the fact that he can appear as an angel of light? He’s even appeared as Jesus to some saint(s). I’ve also seen one member’s tag line says “the devil will tell 1,000 truths to get you to fall for a single lie.”

Anyway, he is a creature and a devious one at that, I think Cena resolved that question for me earlier–he can do both but his aim is always towards evil.
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I wasn’t talking about the devil.
 
blase6 said:
Define freedom.
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He cannot. He doesn’t fully understand what he is talking about.

Absolute freedom ontologically speaking is freedom from the possibility of sin, or freedom from privation. God is the act of existence. For God to sin this would be a privation of his being. But since God is pure actuality, it is impossible for God to have a privation. Only beings that move from potency to act can have a privation in their being because they are not in and of themselves the act of existence.

We as human-beings are not absolutely free. We have free-will which is something different.
 
ChainBreaker said:
I never claimed that “the capacity to choose evil would be a positive quality”. It seems odd to me that you found this claim in the OP.
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The capacity to choose evil does not ADD anything to God’s power, ergo it cannot be a positive quality to choose evil.

You seemed to imply that the lacking the capacity to choose evil would be a limiter on God’s free will. I am saying it would not be because choosing evil would be a negative attribution and take away or lessen God’s power because evil is always a privation or deprivation of some positive capacity or other. That is simply what evil is.

Choosing evil always detracts or takes away from being, so in the case of God, choosing evil would necessarily make God less than omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent.

Even in human beings, free will is the capacity to choose from an array of goods provided they are all licit goods. By choosing evil, the capacity to choose is marshalled against itself to undermine the very capacity to choose itself – that is what evil is and why it is harmful. It blinds and disables the virtues or powers of the soul.

Why would God choose to act against the power of his own will - again what evil is?
 
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