it occurred to me tonight that i am pretty thoroughly a non-calvinist. around the same time, it occurred to me that i've never thought long and hard about how to defend my perspective. so i'm gonna do that here, in survey fashion. if you actually read all this, and are so inclined, feel free to leave a comment. you don't have to be a registered blogspot owner or whatever.
first of all, i need to explain that my epistemology is sort of in progress at the moment, so the criteria that i cite for what i've come to think may sound a bit flimsy, depending on where you're coming from. i don't even know if i myself really think it's the best way to go about it, but sometimes, we can't control what compels us.
philosophical questions about freedom
does freedom exist? i think so. i think i need freedom to exist. i can't be satisfied with any set of ideas that weeds freedom out of human existence. if freedom doesn't exist, then my life means nothing. so that's out of the way.
now. what the crap is freedom? people have lots of answers to this question. like a good calvinist, i used to say that freedom just means making choices according to your desires. what else can there be, right? my will is like a little machine that reads a chart somewhere of my desires. whichever bar's the tallest, whether it's sleep or sex or pleasing God, my will picks that one and does it. and where do desires come from? where everything comes from: God. thus, God is the cause of all things. there is no other cause in the universe. He is entirely sovereign. our role: to sit around and be machines. i have lost the ability to make this option sound in any way appealing. my apologies to anyone who defends this view. i used to say that this doesn't empty our choices of significance, but it fills them with it. this is sweet, but it only gives us significance of the sort that a character in an epic novel has. if that really satisfies you, then you and i have radically different ideals about life, and i'll never be able to explain myself to you.
one silly way to define freedom is as the ability to have chosen otherwise. for example, if life positions me in a place where i must eat an apple, i can only be free in this decision if there are at least two apples. it seems intuitive, but upon inspection, i think it's really a peripheral issue. descartes defined freedom as the ability to choose passionately about something that you have maximum information about. by this definition, the most freedom actually exists in the places where there is no choice at all. for instance, what if everything i knew, all of my experiences, all of the information i could accumulate, compelled me to follow God? would i really have a choice? the alternative possibilities seem smaller and smaller, and ultimate freedom would be the place where no alternative even existed in reality. on the other hand, the place where alternative possibilities most powerfully exist is when we are indifferent, when we could just as easily choose apple one as apple two. who the junk cares which apple i eat? choosing apples is not, to me, the epitome of freedom.
the best way to get at the essence of freedom, as i understand it, is what's called ultimate cause incompatibilism. don't worry about the incompatibilism part, but when i say "ultimate cause," i mean that instead of God being the only, supreme cause of all effects ever, there are lots of little causes running about, and i am one of them. all sorts of factors and ideas and people affect the decisions i make, but when it comes down to it, there's something inside me, distinct from my environment and my God, that gets to decide what to do with all that's been invested in me. i am the ultimate cause of my actions, and, in the frailty of human nature, i can either screw things up horribly or i can do something great.
of course, this doesn't eliminate the dance of human incapacity and divine provision.
c. s. lewis said this:
"If ye are trying to see the final state of all things as it will be (for so ye must speak) when there are no more possibilities left but only the Real, then ye ask what cannot be answered to mortal ears. Time is the very lens through which ye see-small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope-something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves parts of eternal reality. But ye can see it only through the lens of Time, in a little clear picture, through the inverted telescope. It is a picture of moments following one another and yourself in each moment making some choice that might have been otherwise. Neither temporal succession nor the phantom of what ye might have chosen and didn't is itself Freedmon. They are a lens. The picture is a symbol: but it's truer than any philosophical theorem (or, perhaps, than any mystic's vision) that claims to go behind it. For every attempt to see the shape of eternity except through the lens of Time destroys your knowledge of Freedom. Witness the doctrine of Predestination which shows (truly enough) that eternal reality is not waiting for a future in which to be real; but at the price of removing Freedom which is the deeper truth of the two. And wouldn't Universalism do the same? Ye cannot know eternal reality by a definition. Time itself, and all acts and events that fill Time, are the definition, and it must be lived."
-The Great Divorce
orthodoxy quote?
apathy/complacency (apologies for only seeing the negative in the other. talk about how calvinists can only see arrogance in the idea of free will)
freedom as God's greatest gift
Scripture's call to choose
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