This contradicts the traditional Catholic understanding of grace and predestination, which teaches that God does predestine to Heaven either via omnipotence (Thomism) or via omniscience (Molinism), and yet human wills are truly free.
I absolutely feel that he does use omnipotence and omniscience
to some degree to predestine events on Earth- yet he does not predestine people to go to Hell. This is one place where he does not extend his predestining power. To teach that he does would be contradictory to both Thomism and Molinism. The Council of Trent explicitly condemned this.
Logically incoherent. Either they choose or they don’t. If they choose, then they really have a choice.
This complaint merely picks on semantics. My point was that no one has any real choice if everyone who would choose Hell is not created, because then only one “choice” remains.
Logically false. Even if they only choose what God wants them to choose, they still choose, and do so freely.
How can this be so if they only have one possible option?
Remember that they wouldn’t be created if they would have chosen Hell, so the “choice” of Hell isn’t a real possibility for anyone who exists. If it was, they wouldn’t exist.
Moreover, the same dilemma presents itself with regard to God’s omniscience, if we just substitute (“what God foreknows they will choose”) for (“what God wants them to choose”). They can only choose what God foreknows they will choose, so free will doesn’t exist. It’s the same fallacy.
That’s not true, as God’s foreknowledge doesn’t determine behavior any more than the foreknowledge of humans about the behavior of other humans determines their behavior. Churchill felt certain that Hitler would invade Europe. He predicted it, foreknew it. Did he force Hitler? No. What if he had
infallibly foreknown that Hitler would invade Europe? Would that have forced Hitler? No, because in both cases, this is simply his private degree of certainty about what another person will choose. Being sure that a person will choose something doesn’t mean you’ve forced them to choose it at any time in human experience. This can easily be extended to God as well- just as any human foreknowing what another human to do doesn’t force that person to act by the foreknowing, so God doesn’t force anyone to act by his foreknowing. It is certain that what he foreknows will come to pass not because his foreknowledge
makes that so, but because he is eternal and therefore can see the end from the beginning.
Here’s an example for how that works:
Suppose you lived in the US in the 1800s and invented a time machine. You zipped to the future and then read through the history books about the lives of many citizens of Japan from the 1800s. You learn all about Japan’s future and about the people who live there. Then you go back to the United States and your own time period, keep your mouth shut and live your normal life.
Everything in Japan is going on just as you foresaw it would, of course, because you have taken no intervening action. The lives of the citizens that you foreknow will happen in a certain way happen in exactly the way you foresaw. Did they lose all their Free Will because you got infallible knowledge about their destinies? Not in the least. Foreknowledge does not predestine.
This isn’t love. It is gross negligence. I’d rather be a happy robot than an unhappy “free” man.
I’ve heard people say that, but it isn’t really true. Else they’d seek God, repent of their sins, and would receive truth, peace and joy in the Lord Emmanuel, “God with us.” The fact that they don’t implicitly declares that they prefer the unhappiness of sin and darkness to eternal life and joy. People don’t want to give up their sinful ways, and like to be their own masters. They love their self-rule and hate anyone who wants to control them or make them robots. They love freedom, and they love self-mastery. They don’t realize that self-mastery is self-enslavement – in fact, sin makes people robots more than anything else does, but they choose this condition and its inherent enslavement to evil passions (greed, lust, hate, envy, laziness or others), allowing themselves to become controlled by these feelings rather than allowing God to prune them out of their lives by taking control of them and making them his.
Yes, it is. Otherwise, how is it a “real” choice for the elect to choose Him, since they could not do otherwise.
Please explain your point further. I’m not sure what you mean.
In the world you’ve proposed, “choosing” Hell is impossible, because all who would choose Hell are not created. So the choice of Hell is preemptively removed by God before it can become a real option, and everyone only chooses what God in his foreknowledge wants them to choose (he might, presumably, preemptively not create anyone who deviates from his will at all, by your reasoning). That is a puppet show, something absolutely under God’s control that has no possibility of opposing his will. Therefore such an environment cannot be truly free. It’s dressed-up Calvinism (trust me- back when I was a Calvinist this was one of the ideas I held to, about how predestination works. It really does contradict freedom). If destinies were predestined according to God’s foreknowledge, so that everyone came out exactly as God wanted because he only chose people who’d choose everything he wanted exactly as he wanted it, there is no freedom. To the extent that he removes real options from their grasp by choosing only to create those who will do what he wants, freedom is removed. Therefore this use of omniscience clearly contradicts the Catholic doctrine of Free Will.
Well He does just that, according to Thomism or Molinism. If you have a “third way” let’s by all means hear it.
Neither Thomism nor Molinism says that God predestines people to Hell either by His power or his omniscience. This view was condemned by the Council of Trent.
The third way is quite simply what Catholicism teaches- that God allows everyone Free Will, to choose Him or reject Him, and that he simultaneously uses his power and his foreknowledge to
influence them, though not to control them. He uses his resources to try to draw people to Himself, but he does not make them come.
