Gratillonius questions Corentinus:
"'Might God have taken [Dahut] to Him after all?'
"'It is not for us to set bounds on His mercy...'" (pp 502-503)
Corentinus believes that "His mercy" is boundless. Christian apologists reply that creatures can freely reject God's mercy. However, an omnipotent creator creates every aspect of each of His creatures, including the motivations that determine their free choices. "Free" can mean only "unconstrained." At the end of Poul Anderson's The Merman's Children, Fr. Tomislav draws universalist conclusions. Universalism is belief in the salvation of all. I do not accept Tomislav's theist premise but I do think that his conclusion is logical.
18 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Yes, but Fr. Tomislav did not insist on his "universalist" suggestion being more than speculative. As a Catholic priest he would, if pressed, concede that the teaching of the Church is that for salvation to be real, it has to include the risk of being lost. Which means I disagree with your suggestion, because that would mean turning us all into robot, if we lacked the ability to make wrong choices.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
We would not be robots. We would make free choices. A very good person or a saint always freely makes good choices.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
That is simply not true. I can think of any number of canonized saints who led wild or reprobate lives before their conversion. And all of us are prone to making wrong decisions of all kinds at any times.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
That is not the point. I mean a saint who has been canonized no longer sins. God is (believed to be) free but only does good. All of us are prone because of the way we are and God made us.
We have been through all this before. Are human choices merely random? If so, then they are neither free nor morally significant. On that basis, it just happens to us to make one choice instead of another. If choices are not random, then they are caused. The causes are all the forces working on and within an individual. God creates all those forces. He creates all things, including individuals and their psychologies. If the temptation to get drunk is stronger than the good resolution not to drink, then the individual will get drunk. An omnipotent creator could have made the good resolution stronger than the temptation or could have created an individual who was not tempted in that way.
A dog bites an aggressive drunk and a pacifist who lives his beliefs. The drunk automatically kicks the dog. The pacifist does not. Both responses are predictable. Both men act freely. Neither is constrained. Freedom can only mean absence of constraint.
To say that I am describing robots is not to understand the argument.
Paul.
Individuals can surprise us with their actions because we do not know all the factors which together cause those actions. God not only knows all the factors but has complete control over them and could have made them different.
A human parent tells a child not to touch a hot object but the child continues to reach toward it. The parent can either intervene and pull the child away or let the child learn from experience. In the first case, the parent overrides the child's freedom of action. In the second case, he does not. The parent and the child are two finite beings, one stronger than the other. They share a physical environment which neither has created and which is governed by laws which also neither has created. God is not just a stronger parent. He is infinitely more powerful and has created heat, physical laws about how heat affects organisms, a child who is motivated to touch an object even when told not to and so on. God is responsible for everything that happens and both the parent and the child act freely. We can have "free will" in relation to our parents but not in relation to our creator.
Paul.
Paul: causation is not necessarily deterministic.
That is, the same circumstances can produce radically different outcomes; they're contingent.
Even perfect knowledge, therefore, would not enable precise predictions of outcomes.
That's one of the basic insights of quantum mechanics.
Paul: note that in terms of Christian theology, God is not 'in' time, IIRC. Not the way we are.
People make free choices; God 'knows' what they will be not because He's predicting a future that hasn't yet arrived for Him, but because He experiences all of time at once.
He doesn't see you in 'the present', with a past that no longer exists and a future that doesn't exist yet; he sees all of the moments of your existence -together-, all equally present and real.
God exists outside time, or more precisely he -contains- time, from beginning to end, in His eternity.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Exactly, and you replied better than an amateur like me would have. Hmmm, I think Dante made similar comments in the DIVINE COMEDY.
Ad astra! Sean
Two points here: quantum unpredictability; eternal omniscience as against temporal prescience. I understand the latter distinction.
Problems with eternity. A consciousness that was atemporal/durationless/beginning-and-ending- simultaneously would be non-existent just as a mathematically flat plane is a non-existent abstraction. God's eternity must be somehow transtemporal.
I think that it is omnipotence, not omniscience, that is incompatible with "free will" of creatures in relation to their creator.
Omnipotence can exist without being -used- all the time. In a way, in Christian theology God voluntarily 'withdraws' in some senses.
Kaor, Paul!
Except, to build on what Stirling said, God, in His generosity, does not use His omnipotence as often as some of us might wish Him to to do.
Ad astra! Sean
I heard a street preacher say, "God created us to be His companions but, because it is in our nature to do so, we turn away from him." How can it be in our nature either to contradict the purpose of our creation or to turn against Someone Whose companions we were created to be? If He created us, did He not create our natures? A Terrestrial dictator can try, with greater or lesser success, to impose his will on ours because our wills exist independently of his but God created our wills. There cannot be any inclination, disposition or motivation in us that He did not put there and approve of.
Free will? Once we exist, we can have greater or lesser freedom of action in relation to each other but not in relation to a being that supposedly created everything in us, including every possible motivation for action. Some people are tempted to get drunk. Others never are. Everyone could have been created so that they never were. Everyone would then freely choose not to drink too much.
Some of the Bible is determinist. When Pharaoh refuses to let the people go, Satan does not inspire him. There is no Satan in that narrative. God deliberately hardens Pharaoh's heart so that God will have an opportunity to demonstrate His power. God is the sole source both of Moses' goodness and of Pharaoh's evil.
"From nothing" means not from any pre-existing materials that might resist the order being imposed on them. In any case, an omnipotent creator would effortlessly overcome any resistance.
The relationship between creator and creature is not like the relationship between law-making ruler and law-keeping or -breaking subject. Ruler and subject coexist in a shared environment which neither of them made and there is only a finite (even if very great) difference in power between them. God, infinitely powerful, makes every atom, cell, neuron, neuronic connection, mental disposition, environmental detail, physical law etc in the creature and his environment. God determines whether one subject will want to, and will have sufficient motivation to, break the law and another will not. He could have created rulers who never made unjust laws and subjects who always freely chose to obey the laws.
It might be thought that God created the world in its first moment, then left it to run its course, but that would be Deism, not (mono)theism. In monotheism, God, regarding the universe from outside time, sustains it by an act of creative will at every moment. I do not think that creation in the first moment, if there even was one, differs in any way from preservation at any subsequent moment. Thus, He effectively creates us doing whatever we are doing at every moment.
Kaor, Paul!
Unfortunately, we are never going to agree, because I don't believe you to be right.
It would take a scholar like the late Pope Benedict XVI to adequately reply to you.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Sure. Neither of us thinks the other is right. The most that I hope to do here is to clarify what the issues are and we might have made some progress towards that.
Paul.
I have said that before as well!
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