There's a tension in the bible too, isn't there? There is the corporate salvation idea in the idea that just by being Jewish you are saved. Or that you were a member of Noah's family. Or that you put blood on the door and were passed by. And yet there are plenty of examples of individual failure due to poor choices, most horribly seen in Judas. So I guess it's one of these and/boths.

We are free when we choose the Good, that is, we choose that which conforms to the will of God. There is a distinction to be made between "free will" and "self-will". Self-will is able to choose that which God would not have us choose. This may give the illusion of "freedom", but, in fact, when we choose against the will of God, we do so because we are being controlled by forces that turn us away from God and the good; we are far from being "free". We are free when we can say "Not I, but Christ in me."

If God created us, our hearts, and our environment, and we are subject to the laws of determinism like everything else in the universe, then God has no cause to complain about how things turned out.

Will this would certainly be true of the superlapsarians (who believe that God made creation and the fall because he wanted to save and condemn) but not necessarily the infralapsarians, who would say that humanity had the free will and chose the fall, and only as a remedy to this did God determine everything.

Is Rob really saying that free will is choosing to do what God wants and anything else is choosing to do what evil forces want? That doesn't seem like "choosing" to me. Either way you're just responding to pressure.

And just to throw another thought into the mix, I can't help thinking about a show I saw on people with certain types of brain injury. They would do odd or stupid or unreasonable things, and when asked why they did them they would come up with reasons for why they did them. But it was clear that in fact they were acting first and coming up with justifications for their actions afterwards - not just for the benefit of the questioner, but for the benefit of themselves. Makes me wonder how many of our quick decisions are made by some very primitive part of ourselves, and the moral and intellectual compass comes trotting along behind to give us the impression that it was a conscious selection.

David's account of the scoop on choice looks suspiciously like psychological determinism.

Even Leibniz couldn't stomach what was called the "liberty of indifference," and insisted that if so and so chose A over B then A somehow looked better to so and so. No problem of tie-breaking for L, who insists there are never ties.

He even insisted on this for God, claiming ours is the unique best of all possible worlds, and insisting that if there had not been a unique best among worlds God could not have created at all.

Oh? And is that what we mean by "free choice"?

PS. L's passion for uniqueness and horror of sameness even extended to such things as his principle of the the identity of indiscernibles, known to sceptics as "Leibniz's lie." Odd.

PPS. You might do better with your account of freedom if you stop thinking it's the brain that chooses.

Still, it is true that any philosophical account of libertarian choice will end up agreeing that it involves an interruption of lawful behavior in the body, somewhere or other. The traditional physicalist word for this goes back to Epicurus' doctrine of swerve.

Substance dualists think of it as something that parallels God's relationship to the world. The Muslims colorfully say, "God has only to say to a thing, 'Be,' and it is." Thus a mental even like a volition commands, as it were, a motion of the body, and Lo! One occurs!

[Don't be deceived by the joking tone. This is my own real view. No kidding.]

Descartes, if I recall correctly, suggested the pineal gland as the locus at which the body first obeys the command and does something that plays out, now fully in accord with physical law, as, say, the raising of an arm.

The idea of anything so radical, or of any causal interaction at all as between the human mind (aka "soul") and the body, so disturbed Leibniz that he invented his famous doctrine of pre-established harmony to avoid it.

A view that Kant picked up when he fissured reality as between noumenal and phenomenal, limiting knowledge to make room for faith.

But, how I do go on!

Anyway, stop being quite so much the physical girl. It'll go better.

And what kind of a God do you believe in, anyway, that you have so much trouble with merely human immateriality?

Jessamyn:
Yes, I am saying that anything we do that does not conform to the will of God must therefore conform to that which is not-God, and therefore, evil. God sustains all that is good. By giving up self-will, and by striving to do the good, as revealed to us in Jesus Christ, we will be always striving to do the good. We will usually fail, because our fallen nature does not allow us to keep our attention focused in the direction of the good, but we will be doing the best that we can. This is why St. Paul admonished us to pray constantly. This does not negate the role of our God-given reason. It is reason that we need to use in order to receive, understand, and enact the teachings of Jesus Christ as presented in the revelation, and to differentiate the good from the evil. We can do this, however, not through the exercise of self-will, but only with the help of God's grace. If you can't call this "free will", I have no problem with that; I'm not fully committed to the term myself. I am committed to "the truth shall set you free", however, and this may be exactly how "free will" is established in an individual.

"We can't fly, breathe water..."

Have you seen the movie The Abyss? They breathe water in that movie, and they said that that stuff really exists!

</dork>

What I was doubting was whether even the choices we make are not fundamentally determined by causes outside ourselves.

I think the idea is that either we have the capacity to make free -- that is, contingent or non-necessary -- choices, or our ability to choose is imaginary, a false perception rather than a reality.

The language of choice implies, don't you think, a true capacity to choose. We wouldn't ordinarily say that the typical piano chooses which note it plays, and if the choices we make are fundamentally determined by causes outside ourselves, what we think of as our will is in the same position as a piano, being played by (for example) the state of the universe at the time we do what we perceive as making a choice.

We all have the experience of making a choice between two options, each of which is in some way desireable. Is that experience wholly illusionary, or only partially so? Can it ever wholly reflect reality?

"Is that experience wholly illusionary, or only partially so? Can it ever wholly reflect reality?"

Tom--
If your choice is in accord with God's will, because you *want* to choose in accordance with God's will, then your choice is free, and you have chosen the good, which is the ultimate reality. Otherwise, I think, your freedom is only illusory, be it based on brain chemistry, or demonic influence.

I think it all started when man discovered The Knowledge of Good & Evil, i.e. the Adam & Eve story. (And I personally think this represents a time when we evolutionarily branched off from the apes.)

Thus man is made in the image of God, because God has knowledge of good & evil. You don't *judge* a dog when it attacks -- it is not MEAN because it cannot choose (although it may need to be put down as a danger to society). You don't *judge* a wild animal for killing/harming another -- it is acting instinctively, and does not choose. It does not know right from wrong -- in fact, it does not even function under such definitions. It does not possess knowledge of good & evil.

But man DOES have that knowledge. And therefore is capable of choice. That, I think, is free will.

(And the fact that we have not necessarily evolved very far and often act from base instinct or are easily manipulated does not negate the fact that we do possess free will.)

PS, just found your site today, and like it very much!