The Free Will Problem

[ateista]

Because He already did that. He came into the world, was ridiculed, humilited and crucified for crimes He was completely innocent of.

Your apparent lack of answers is addressed in James

Thomas demanded a sign, yet Jesus says:

Suggesting the blessing are also available to those who accept the testimony of others.

You can, and do, have that chance. However, since we are not yet permitted to have time machines, you must do it with the eyes of your heart.

I’m not sure what the “it” is in the last sentence.

Sorry, as far as I know, Jesus never withdrew his promise. He never said: “from now on you must rely on the testimony of others”. So my question remains: “why does not Jesus fulfill his promise?”. If I need a personal verification, it would be easy for him to grant it.

The believers say that Jesus loves everyone, and wants everyone to be with him. For some people a second-hand information is sufficient, for others it is not - we are not equal, after all. To help everyone achieve what Jesus wants it makes sense to use a “personalized” approach.

But, be as it may, no matter how many times we go around it: “Jesus promised that everyone may ask him and he will go to the Father. And he did not deliver”.

 

[ateista]

This is not true. Faith is an act of the will, and you can choose to follow God even if you do not yet understand everything. People can be mistaken and misled by faulty reason. God knows this, and allows acts of pure will to be sufficient for faith.

If faith is an act of “will”, then please “will” yourself to believe in the tooth fairy, and see if you succeed.

Atheism for many people is basicly pride, for they decide to trust in themselves and their own reasoning capabilities rather than God.

I trust myself, because I have verified zillions of times that my judgment is usually sound - definitely not always, but most of the time. I would trust God, if only I could verify his existence.

But you ask something else: you ask me to trust you! (You - of course - in plural). Why should I trust you? Your statements are confusing and contradictory. You cannot substantiate that your views are more than wishful thinking.

In the Bible Jesus actually promises that we can ask anything and he will grant our wish. All I am asking for is his appearance, so I can accept him. I do not ask for mountains to move yonder, I do not ask for jackpots on the lottery… why does he not grant my wish?

This doesn’t mean that reason is worthless. God gave us this gift, and expects us to use it. However, we need to always remember that we are fallible.

Actually the Bible actually says that the “wisdom of Earth is folly with God”, so it does not actually “encourge” the use of reason, does it?

 

[gdibella]

Ateista’s question is a good one: Why doesn’t God personally give evidence of his existence to those who do not believe in him, and then allow the unbeliever to believe?

The result of such a situation is that there would be no faith, as faith cannot be certain knowledge of a demonstrated conclusion (scientia).
*So your objection is not, I think, to the fact that faith means that God does not offer proof of himself to those who doubt him. The very concept of faith is what I would suppose frustrates you in that it does not offer “personal verification”. *

To validate what I am saying (and hopefully find out where your problem with faith & God’s existence lies) look at the following (from a paper I’ve written, which hopefully is clear):

Aquinas (II.II) tells us in Article 5 of Question 1 that those matters that are of faith cannot be certain knowledge of a demonstrated conclusion. Aquinas formulates the main objection as follows: “Those matters which are demonstrated are an object of science, since a “demonstration” is a syllogism that produces science. Now certain matters of faith have been demonstrated by the philosophers, …] such as the Existence of God. Therefore faith can be an object of science.”

Aquinas responds, “All science is derived from self-evident and therefore “seen” principles; wherefore all objects of science must be, in a fashion, seen. It is equally impossible for one and the same thing to be an object of science and of belief for the same person.”

Replying to the objection, Aquinas notes that that which can be proved by demonstration "are reckoned among the articles of faith, not because they are believed simply by all, but because they are a necessary presupposition to matters of faith, so that those who do not know them by demonstration must know them first of all by faith.”

In effect (to summarize), the personal verification which you request God grant to you erases both what faith is and the consequent reward of faith.

If your objection is as to (I think a separate question) why God doesn’t prove his existence even if it removes faith, let me know. I think I could help in addressing your objections.

To note, Jesus’ saying in Matthew 7:7 (and likewise)
“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.” is subject to interpretation. Clearly, theists of every stripe recognize that not all or even most prayers to God are granted (e.g. “God let me win the lottery”).
To read such passages as “Jesus/God should be able to give anything to me I want” is to miss out on several key understandings on the nature of prayer.
Briefly:

1. Every prayer is in the manner of a request per modum suffragium that God can reject for several reasons (your apparent good might not be that which is actually good for you, as your desire for something like winning the lottery might be rooted in greed, etc.).
2. Sayings like Mthw. 7:7 are understood in that that which is given to you by God is for your teleological good in a larger sense, but not necessarily regarding your particular request.
3. To say that God is subject to the demands of your prayer is a theologically untenable position as it presumes that the supplicant’s knowledge and root cause of his request is above God’s providence and omniscience.

You are right that the faculty of will in not sufficient to make oneself believe in something. Faith requires thinking with assent, and you can habituate yourself towards acts of faith but faith requires knowledge as well as will.

Again, it has been stated above (Q[2], AA[1],2) that to believe is an act of the intellect inasmuch as the will moves it to assent. And this act proceeds from the will and the intellect, both of which have a natural aptitude to be perfected in this way. Consequently, if the act of faith is to be perfect, there needs to be a habit in the will as well as in the intellect: even as there needs to be the habit of prudence in the reason, besides the habit of temperance in the concupiscible faculty, in order that the act of that faculty be perfect. **Now, to believe is immediately an act of the intellect, because the object of that act is “the true,” which pertains properly to the intellect. **Consequently faith, which is the proper principle of that act, must needs reside in the intellect.

A request for faith in God is neither asking you to abandon your reason nor perform a superhuman task of the will. It is a request to assent to a reality understood through the intellect.

I hope this helped.
–Greg

 

[Sarpedon]

If faith is an act of “will”, then please “will” yourself to believe in the tooth fairy, and see if you succeed.

I’m not inclined to place my trust in it and follow it. Look at it this way- I can swear allegiance to a political organization even if I don’t really understand the ideology. As long as I am willing to accept it as truth I can be part of the organization.

As pointed out in the last post, intellectual assent is indeed part of faith. However, I would see intellectually acknowledging your fallibility and potential for wrong reason sufficient in this regard. In other words, intellectually acknowledging that even though you personally do not understand exactly how God can exist, you are willing to place your trust in God rather than yourself. I can’t imagine that complete theological and philosophical understanding is necessary for faith in God.

I trust myself, because I have verified zillions of times that my judgment is usually sound - definitely not always, but most of the time. I would trust God, if only I could verify his existence.

You admit a potential for error. What if your lack of ability to verify God is one of these errors?

But you ask something else: you ask me to trust you! (You - of course - in plural). Why should I trust you? Your statements are confusing and contradictory. You cannot substantiate that your views are more than wishful thinking.

I’m not asking you to trust me or any other theist. Rather, look at our arguments, See if they are valid, while keeping in mind your own (mine as well) fallibility. Search for God through reason, while keeping the big picture in view.

I apologize if I was confusing. I tend to write as I think, which sometimes results in poor explanations. If you want me to clarify anything, I will be happy to do so.

What has been contradictory? I would like to examine these because I don’t want to propound a false argument.

In regards to your last line, you are correct in that I have not syllogistically argued for some of my axioms. However, neither have you. Personally, I find some your unproven axioms, such as the accuracy of the mind without God (back to EAAN, which you have not yet syllogistically argued for), somewhat non-evident.

In the Bible Jesus actually promises that we can ask anything and he will grant our wish. All I am asking for is his appearance, so I can accept him. I do not ask for mountains to move yonder, I do not ask for jackpots on the lottery… why does he not grant my wish?

Can you quote the Bible for your assertation? God answers all of our prayers, but sometimes the answer is no. To have a situation in which God grants our every wish would be quite absurd, because almost anything would be possible.

If He appeared to you, would you dismiss it as a hallucination? Would you really be convinced?

Maybe He has appeared to you, but you have not recognized Him. Maybe he has appeared through the 5 ways, EAAN, as well as all the other great philosophical works of the Christian tradition. Maybe He has appeared to you through the beauty of creation. Maybe He has appeared to you through acts of love by your fellow man. Are you really in any position to require something that atheistic science will dismiss as hallucinatory?

Actually the Bible actually says that the “wisdom of Earth is folly with God”, so it does not actually “encourge” the use of reason, does it?

It’s extremely dangerous to interpret ancient Biblical texts without an infallible guide (the magisterium). This passage can be interpreted in many ways, so you need an authority to decide. Perhaps “wisdom of the earth” refers to the tendency of men wrapped up in worldly things to nearly worship reason and the human person, rather than the Giver of reason. Whose interpretation is correct, yours or mine? I’ll let the magisterium decide for me, because otherwise either interpretation could be valid.

 

[Sarpedon]

You are right that the faculty of will in not sufficient to make oneself believe in something. Faith requires thinking with assent, and you can habituate yourself towards acts of faith but faith requires knowledge as well as will.

Would you agree that intellectually acknowledging your own potential for error would count as intellectual assent? That even if you don’t understand how to explain how God can exist, acknowledging your own flawed understanding and trusting God would be sufficent?

 

[gdibella]

Yes, as “thinking with assent” does not require that each of us have all the answers. In fact, to quote Wicksteed (the whole quote, though long, is worthwhile) :

“Our reasoning, then, may comfort and please the believer by showing him that he need not accept these doctrines as blankly unintelligible facts, imposed upon him by authority, but may see some kind of meaning in them, and may trace a relation at least between the processes of his own reasoning and the facts of ultimate truth. But he must be exceedingly careful to remember that at best these arguments can only raise presumptions, and can never amount to a proof of the core of revealed truth. They must never be put forward for anything more than they are: So strongly does Aquinas feel this that, when he has given a series of exceedingly powerful and moving arguments against the doctrine of eternal creation, instead of resting in his conclusions he proceeds expressly and elaborately to demonstrate that his arguments are not conclusive, so that our ultimate faith in the truth about creation must rest on the authority of Scripture.1 But if reason cannot attain to the highest of revealed truths, so that arguments in support of (1 Contra Gentiles, ii. 38.) such truths cannot be conclusive, it is also and a fortiori true that arguments against them cannot be conclusive either.”

So, in fact, reason is support of faith can never be conclusive in the sense that, for example, an empirical test can be conclusive. Ultimately, even the most reasoned believer requires faith as the origin of “thought with assent”.

Hope this helps.

–Greg

 

[ateista]

God has given you the ability to bring those essences you mentioned from potentiality to actuality. If you use it as a diary, you bring that essence into existence. If you use it as a notebook or ledger, you bring those essences into existence. If you use it for fuel or TP, you are using the same essence for different ends.

That is not the point. Does the empty notebook have an “essence”? Does a pebble have an “essence”? Does a hydrogen atom have an “essence”?

 

[ateista]

You ignore an important definition. The defintion of God at least in the Christian sense is a being with infinite power and knowledge.

No, I did not forget it. Being limitless in power does not mean that God is able to create a logical contradiction in a physical form. God cannot create a triangle with 4 sides or a married bachelor, no matter how powerful he is. This limitation is accepted by theologians, too, understanding that the denial would be nonsensical.

The same applies to knowledge. To “know” something, to have information about something necessarily presupposes that the “something” exists. To have information about a nonexistent chair (for example) is sheer nonsense. There is no difference between a nonexistent chair and a nonexistent table.

 

[gdibella]

The simple answer is yes, insofar as each of the items you mentioned has a series of commonalities that are termed “essences”. Admittedly, I don’t understand where your disagreement lies.

Let me (if I may) walk the reader through a progression designed to shed light on what “essence” means:
Often statements are heard like “All chairs have legs [or insert other descriptor of a chair here].” If you tell me in truth that you have seen a chair, I can tell you something about that chair (that it has legs) without seeing it. However, problems arise:

1. I have not seen all chairs.
2. How do I know that what I term a “chair” inherently has legs?
3. Couldn’t I have seen a variety of four-legged pieces of furniture with backs?

The resolution of this apparently simple question is that the human mind performs an abstraction. Here I am using the word in a technincal sense to refer to that process of the mind whereby we assign a name (“chair”) to a set of shared commonalities. What this means with regards to the term “essence” is that an essence is a process of abstraction that goes further than shared commonalities and answers the question what something is. For example, (to borrow from Cath Ency.) the question “what is man?” is answered by descriptors of man’s essence. Man is mortal, man is finite, man is a person with one nature. **Note that physical descriptors would not work. Man is not 5’10’’. A man is 5’10". Physical descriptors are of necessity particular rather than general and do not answer the question what is man. ** However (and I’m sure it occurs to someone) , biological descriptors (man is a vertebrate w/ a nervous system, etc.) answer more generally man’s physical traits. But they do not answer what man’s essence is, questions like “is man by nature good”?
Thus, by essence, we mean not “give a list of physical descriptors” but "what properties allow us to abstract and apply the term ‘man’ "?
The simplest answer as to what is man is a person consisting of union of a mutable body and an immutable soul with one nature .

But to those who disagree with the standard Aristotelian view of essence (or Platonic or Thomist or realist) briefly sketched above, I would ask:

1. Tell me what your position is (skepticism, empiricism) and where you disagree.
2. Tell me whether the human process of abstraction is true or false.
3. Tell me why generalizing this process in #2 to answer the question what something is does not seem true or applicable.

The term “essence” is as pragmatic a term as possible: It answers even children’s questions like “What am I? What is this?”

–Greg

 

[gdibella]

Yes, you are correct in saying that God can’t make a 4-sided triangle. But with regards to “free will” a being that exists outside of time does not seem to be a logical contradiction, especially when we consider that there is no definition of “being” that necessitates action in time. Admittedly, many beings function in time (human, animal, etc.) but I can conceive and even define what it means to experience only the “eternal present”. Hence, there seems to be no contradiction once you understand what the doctrine means.

 

[Cajetan]

I don’t have the time or inclination to read where this discussion has gone from the initial post, but here is a thought regarding divine omniscience (God is “all-knowing”) and free will:

There is a difference between knowing and willing. God, being omniscient, certainly KNOWS everything, but, since God is also omnibenevolent (“all-good”), God can only WILL what is good. How does God cause any thing to happen? By willing it.

From this, it follows that God is not responsible for (did not will/cause) the evil in the world. (For God to be responsible, God would have to not be omnibenevolent, which we do not claim.) And from this it follows that the evil in the world must be caused by non-divine agents who are free to act against the will of God.

ALSO – and this is very important – we must always remember when entertaining notions of divine “foreknowledge” and human freedom that, truthfully, there is no such thing as divine foreknowledge. God is omniscient, but since God is extra-temporal to an infinite degree, God is timeless, time being just one aspect of God’s Creation, outside of which God exists. This means that God does not foreknow anything; for God to know something BEFORE it happens, God would have to exist within time.

Which is to say, if an atheist or agnostic approaches you and says “God’s foreknowledge and human freedom are inconsistent,” all you really need to say is that there is no such thing as foreknowledge and their argument is dead in the water. Q.E.D.

 

[gdibella]

I couldn’t agree more with the last post. The way to resolve this apparent conflict, as Cajetan explains, is to first understand that God operates outside time. And remember that God pre exists creation and hence time. IF time, at its most basic, is a measure of movement, time must require matter (that moves). Before the universe (and all matter) God existed. The boundaries of time do not apply to God especially when we consider that God logically pre exists all matter. Hence God knows the future because “the future” is a later point in time from our point of reference that God continually comprehends.
(Think of a timeline. God would be “above” the timeline and able to affect change in any time he wishes, while respecting our free will.) God, fortunately for us, does not correct our mistakes.

 

[Sarpedon]

That is not the point. Does the empty notebook have an “essence”? Does a pebble have an “essence”? Does a hydrogen atom have an “essence”?

Yes. Why is this an issue?

 

[Sarpedon]

The same applies to knowledge. To “know” something, to have information about something necessarily presupposes that the “something” exists. To have information about a nonexistent chair (for example) is sheer nonsense. There is no difference between a nonexistent chair and a nonexistent table.

This is a human way of knowing. What makes you think God would necessarily be bound by our way? We are made in the image and likeness of God, not the other way around.

 

[gdibella]

For that matter, all future events are presently non-existent. But God is not bound by that which exists currently.
In fact, God’s creation of the universe was ex nihilo lit. out of nothing. So, God is certainly not bound by that which exists in our time and place.

And a further consideration: God is the only non-contingent being. So God can also make that which is now something into nothing. He holds all things in existence. If God lacks no perfection, he has the ability to exist outside space and time. Both are limitations that present imperfections. Keep in mind that God is infinite in essence and thus has knowledge of not only all things but all potentialities.

–Greg

 

[ateista]

Yes. Why is this an issue?

Well, then what is the essence of a pebble? Of a grain of sand? Of a neutrino? What is the essence of a thought? All these are existent entities.

This is a human way of knowing. What makes you think God would necessarily be bound by our way? We are made in the image and likeness of God, not the other way around.

In my opinion it is exactly the other way around. But that is neither here nor there.

You could argue with equal force that we are bound by the laws of logic, but God is not, and he could create a “married bachelor” or a 4-sided triangle if he wanted to. Why don’t you argue that? In older times people did, but then they realized that it is sheer nonsense.

“Knowing” is to have information about something. It is not the human way of “knowing”. It is the only way of knowing.

Was logic created by God, or is logic something that limits God as well?

 

[ateista]

Keep in mind that God is infinite in essence and thus has knowledge of not only all things but all potentialities.

We have similar “powers”. We also “know” that tossing a coin will either land on heads or tails, or - conceivably - on its edge. That does not qualify as “knowledge” in the sense of “knowing” the actual outcome as opposed to the possible outcome. Knowing the possible outcome is obvious, knowing the actual outcome is not.

 

[Sarpedon]

We have similar “powers”. We also “know” that tossing a coin will either land on heads or tails, or - conceivably - on its edge. That does not qualify as “knowledge” in the sense of “knowing” the actual outcome as opposed to the possible outcome. Knowing the possible outcome is obvious, knowing the actual outcome is not.

We are not omniscient. God is.

 

[ateista]

We are not omniscient. God is.

And just like omnipotence - which is not “God can do anything” - it is “God can do anything that can be done”, omniscience is not “knowing everything”, it is “knowing everything that can be known”. Same principle!

 

[Sarpedon]

Well, then what is the essence of a pebble? Of a grain of sand? Of a neutrino? What is the essence of a thought? All these are existent entities.

I suppose you could say that the essence of a pebble is a small aggregation of certain types (or type) of molecules (that form geologic structures) in the solid state. The same for a grain of sand, although it is smaller and sometimes composed of a single molecule. The essence of a neutrino would be a parallel case. I’m not sure with thought, but depending on how you define it I would guess that it is the functioning of the mind (for me, it is not only physical).

I don’t really see your point here.

Keep in mind that so far you have only listed non-sentient things. Things get more complex when you add souls and intellects and such.

In my opinion it is exactly the other way around. But that is neither here nor there.

You could argue with equal force that we are bound by the laws of logic, but God is not, and he could create a “married bachelor” or a 4-sided triangle if he wanted to. Why don’t you argue that? In older times people did, but then they realized that it is sheer nonsense.

“Knowing” is to have information about something. It is not the human way of “knowing”. It is the only way of knowing.

That isn’t inherently impossible, but it would render it essentially impossible to know any attributes of God through reason. Reason is based heavily off logic, and if God did not reflect logic, reason would essentially be worthless in regards to God. However, since I believe God loves us and wants us to arrive at truth through both our reason and revelation, I believe that our logic corresponds with the nature of God.