Great post, Camassia. It's pretty ironic that a Lutheran(!) told you that you couldn't be a Christian unless you believe in free will. Has he/she read Luther's debate with Erasmus??

Maybe the obsession with free will is itself a manifestation of sin. We want to hold on to that little corner of creation where we really are in charge.

Anyway, in his book "God So Loved the World" Jonathan Wilson talks about how the different theories of atonement are complementary in that they're relevant to different situations. When we are victimized and oppressed by forces beyond our control the "Christus Victor" model reminds us that sin is a power that grips us and that Christ is our liberator. But when we sin against others, the Anselmian/Substiution models offer us forgiveness and reconciliation. Wilson suggests that a complete picture needs to hold on to both of these perspectives.

Of course, this doesn't solve the intellectual problem of free will, but I think we need to at least start with the phenomena as we experience them: sometimes we're victims and sometimes we're victimizers (and sometimes both).

The Get Religion commenter is mistaken. A universe without flood, fire, pestilence or famine is not only imaginable, it is promised.

A life in such a place may strike the commenter as pointless, but that's the life for which we were created, the life toward which Christ calls us.

I think determinism and free will may well exist at the same time, perhaps in a similar way to a coin being tossed 100 times, free will being the equivalent to a choice in each instance between heads and tails, determinism showing itself in the long run.

Also, as with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, each may be impossible to pin down in relation to the other at any moment.

Where would this free-floating decision generator have come from?

Well... from God, right?

Sure, lets call it God. Why not?

"A life in such a place may strike the commenter as pointless, but that's the life for which we were created, the life toward which Christ calls us."

The other thing that is promised along with that is the perfection of humanity, though. What kind of relationship do you think we fallible humans would have to God in the face of a stopped tidal wave off some coast, held there by God's hand? Especially in the age of CNN?

Not to mention the inevitable fighting, leading to violence even, as people bicker over whose god was responsible for the great miracle. People in the fallen world do not react as faithfully in the face of miracles here as I hope we will in the life you mention, Tom.

I should make clear here that I'm not so much arguing that free will doesn't exist, as that if it exists it does so in much too constrained a fashion to bear the theological weight that Lewis puts on it. We do not face infinite possibilities every time we make a decision; our decisions are forced by circumstances. It is rather like a servant whose master tells him to go to Harrod's and pick out a green tie suitable for tonight's dinner party. The servant has a choice of ties, but everything else about the situation (including the fact that he's choosing ties to begin with) is beyond his control. I don't see that as enough to explain the problem of evil, let alone the meaning of life.

I also agree with Tom that the idea that evil is somehow necessary for freedom also creates a problem for the promise of heaven. In fact, I've known some atheists who say that they don't want to get into the Christian heaven because it sounds like they'll be God's eternal lapdog. Evil, in fact, sounds freer than good, because good is simply obeying the Big Daddy's commands while sin is making your own decisions. As I said, Christian tradition actually portrays it as the reverse: sin is slavery, Christ is freedom.

I agree that the perfection of humanity is supposed to go along with the arrival of heaven, and perhaps that's why we aren't there yet. Still, C.C.'s scenario assumes that, if God spares us from disasters, everything else about the world would be the same -- there would still be CNN, different religions, etc. Maybe that would be true in a one-off case, but obviously if we lived in a world generally without natural evil, human society would be very different. Different in what way, is beyond my powers to speculate.

Will it be humanity as a whole or could it be one soul at a time that is perfected and attains heaven? Could it be as according to Thomas' Jesus that: "It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying 'here it is' or 'there it is.' Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it."(?)

As Camassia suggests, a universe in which there are no tidal waves that must be stopped is hardly unimaginable. Nor would it require endless miracles.

Or, put differently, a universe in which a continual procession of miracles occurs is one in which a continual procession of miracles is part of the natural laws, which means they aren't miracles.

I'm not sure how much religious bickering has occurred over the miracle of gravity.

The existence of the universe is a miracle in itself and subject to revision--*at any time now*--by its Author.
But the rock that free will crashes up against is not material determinism, but divine Omniscience.

For Aquinas, free will follows necessarily from the ability of humans to think rationally. If you can choose between courses of action, you have free will -- and in fact, free will is precisely the ability to choose between more than one thing, each of which is good in some respect.

I'd be surprised to learn of a scientific experiment that can demonstrate humans lack the ability to choose.

The difference between determinism and predestination based on God's omniscience, is that, as jim has pointed out, determinism is limited by the laws of physics and may be, or seem to be, locally and temporarily inoperative. God's will is not, however, limited, either temporally or spatially, since it is eternal. In the mind of God, then what was and what will be must not be differentiated in any way, but must simply be what is, now and forever more. What God has seen that you will be and do, you will be and do.

I'm definitely not in the lonely minority that doesn't like C.S. Lewis; I loved his Narnia books as a child, enjoyed the wit of The Screwtape Letters, and have the usual ready store of favorite quotes form his other works. But his theodicy in _The Problem of Pain_ left me cold, I have to admit. I much preferred _A Grief Observed_, where he was wrestling with the loss of his wife and not having his thoughts about God work out so neatly. For what it's worth.

When I first glanced at your post, the line "The choice is between a cosmos in which law is the norm and miracle the exception ..." leapt out at me and I was going to say, "Yes!" until I realized the writer was going somewhere completely different with that juxtaposition from where I go. When I've thought in those terms, it didn't really have anything to do with theodicy, or free will, or whether we really need to live in a world where tsunamis cause massive destruction; it was more my way of phrasing my resistance to a certain variety of Christian thinking which assumes scientific knowledge is particularly unreliable. And saying that God put us in a world which actually works the way it looks, where what you can infer about natural law by the scientific method makes some sort of sense, not one where what looks like a lot of darn good evidence for evolution has just been stuck there to confuse us. (I suppose Tom is right that a world where miracle is the norm would simply be a world where miracle was natural law, but then, you'd still be able to see, by observation, that that is the way the world works.)

This wins my "best post of the first week of 2005" award. This bit is superb, and will have me thinking quite a bit:

Adulthood, then, means replacing your parents rather than shaking them loose. So Pauls' language of being heirs to the kingdom and coming into one's inheritance wouldn't have referred to a cosmic trust fund, but the idea that, now that God's laws were written on their hearts, Christians could truly image God on earth and in heaven.

Excellent.

First, determinism basically claims that the universe is a clockwork system whose future is completely determined to result in one set or determined chain of events. This seemed to be an understandable position in the nineteenth century when everything we could examine seemed to work strictly according to rigid, mechanistic, nonrandom laws. But Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle tells us that the universe is fundamentally non-deterministic, for it shows that randomness exists in nature at the most fundamental level. If there are random events at the subatomic level, then events at larger levels cannot be completely unrandom, although in many situations there can be a high degree of predictability as to the relative frequency of certain outcomes. Of course, this doesn't necessarily address the issue of our free will, but it does suggest that a person who experiences a particular set of conditions does not by necessity end up as one pre-determined end product (or to explain differently, if we could construct a scenario where two genetically identical people underwent identical experiences, they would not necessarily end up exactly the same; very similar, perhaps, but not exactly the same). Determinism seems to be implausible, but free will may still be a chimera. I think both philosophers and theologians have yet to come to terms with the facts that nature is both so highly predictable *and* so highly random at the same time. Acknowledgment of this paradox might be helpful for solving, or at least moving us in the direction of understanding better, some of the topics you talk about here.

Second, Tom says:

"As Camassia suggests, a universe in which there are no tidal waves that must be stopped is hardly unimaginable. ... I'm not sure how much religious bickering has occurred over the miracle of gravity."

Indeed, I find it hard to imagine a world that has anything similar to the chemistry and physics of ours (and if we're going to "imagine" a different kind of world, we would need to account for such details as plate tectonics, radioactive decay (which keeps Earth's core from freezing, and thus allows for molten rock, which allows for plate tectonics, etc.) that doesn't require the possibility of tidal waves, or other such natural disasters. It would be a much different universe, and thus our relation to it would necessarily be much different. If we had a universe that was supported by a constant string of (relatively) unpredictable miracles (since (relatively) predictable miracles are not miracles at all but natural laws; I don't see why people want to call something like gravity a miracle, but I think it has to do with Christianity's current anti-scientific predilection to define miracles as something God does while what happens in nature isn't as connected to God (and thus if we want to say God *is* working through natural laws like gravity, we have to name that as a "miracle"), whereas I think it makes much more sense to think of God as creating natural laws to order to universe while creating miracles if and when he wants to work outside that natural law framework; both are created by God, but a miracle is only a subset of God's creative action and is the exception, not the rule), we wouldn't be able to rely on any of our measurements, any of our calculations, and even precious few of our experience-based intuitions. Such a universe may end up seeming completely random and un-intelligible; I can't really imagine such a universe, but I know that I don't want to live in it. And I know I wouldn't want to live in a world which had almost none of the complexity that ours has (which seems to be the other option for "imagining" a world in which tsunamis couldn't exist).

Some of this conversation reminds me of Marvin's recent comments over at . He talks about how wild animals and native hunter gatherers were in tune with nature enough to know that a tsunami was coming and to get to higher ground; very few of them were killed. Those who were in a position close to nature (in an experiential sense, not in a scientific understanding sense), were able to survive.

It would be a much different universe, and thus our relation to it would necessarily be much different.

Sure. For one thing, we don't exist in that universe.

But my point was that universes are easily imagined in which nothing is destroyed. That nothing is destroyed is a sufficient condition for the absence of natural evil without a constant string of miracles; there are probably other conditions that would work, too. How complex these imagined universes are would depend, I suppose, on how long we spent imagining them.

I don't know that anyone particularly wants to call gravity a miracle, other than to make a rhetorical point. My rhetorical point was that we don't call gravity a miracle, because it is a law of this universe. Scientists in a universe in which nothing is destroyed and there is no gravity would not call nothing being destroyed a miracle, but they might call gravity a miracle if they observed it (and if they weren't dogmatic materialists).

By the way, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle has to do with how accurately an observer can measure both position and momentum of an object, not with randomness.

Finally, I think we need to be very careful about using scientific evidence of randomness in our philosophy. Scientifically, randomness is a way of modeling behavior; philosophically, it's a problem of epistemology. We should probably just leave it out of our theology altogether; at the least we shouldn't import it simply because scientists talk about it, since there's no telling what they will be saying in fifty years.