One of the recurring themes in Joe Rogan's program with Wesley Huff was the idea that it's so difficult to discern the truth about some of the issues they discussed, including the evidence for Christianity. Rogan repeatedly brought the subject up, but I don't think he ever put it in the form of a question.
When that kind of sentiment comes up, a good way to respond is to mention one or more counterexamples. It's not difficult to discern Jesus' prominence in history, for example, which increases the plausibility of his being a source of Divine revelation. Or you could mention the significance of hostile corroboration of Jesus' resurrection, which is something unusual and widely acknowledged (James' claim to have seen Jesus risen from the dead, Paul's claim, non-Christian corroboration of the empty tomb, etc.). Or bring up some events involved in prophecy fulfillment that are widely accepted (Jesus' death by crucifixion, the timing of the crucifixion, the Romans' destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, etc.). For further discussion of issues like these, see here, among other relevant posts in our archives.
Another point worth making is that people give a lot of time, attention, and other resources to their general education, their career, sports, music, and other things in life. Why think they don't have the resources needed to adequately discern the issues relevant to Christianity?
Showing posts with label Moral Responsibility. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Moral Responsibility. Show all posts
Sunday, January 12, 2025
Thursday, September 12, 2024
A King Who Beholds Us
"Even in the very palaces among us, should one introduce a harlot and enjoy her, or be oppressed by excess of wine, or commit any other like indecency, he would suffer extreme punishment. But if it be intolerable that men should dare such things in palaces, much more when the King is everywhere present, and observes what is done, shall we if we dare them undergo severest chastisement. Wherefore let us, I exhort you, show forth in our life much gentleness, much purity, for we have a King who beholds all our actions continually." (John Chrysostom, Homilies On John, 5:5)
Tuesday, July 23, 2024
Let Us Arise And Be Doing, And The Lord Will Be With Us
Don't use your dependence on God as an excuse for doing less than God has enabled you to do:
Sunday, August 13, 2023
Stop Giving So Much Deference To Where People Are
It's often suggested that we shouldn't expect much more from people than what they're already doing. Don't expect people to think in much depth about certain issues, don't expect them to read much, don't expect them to improve their moral standards much, etc. I do a lot of work in apologetics. We're often told that we shouldn't expect much from the average person or the average Christian in that context. Supposedly, if people aren't doing more, then that proves that they can't do more, that it would be too difficult to get them to do more, or some such thing.
Where would the world be today if that kind of mindset had been adopted by the people who changed the world for the better in previous generations? Why did Jesus deliver the Sermon on the Mount? His standards were too high. He shouldn't have expected so much from people. "I am aware that your precepts in the so-called Gospel are so wonderful and so great, that I suspect no one can keep them", said Trypho, but that didn't keep Jesus and the early Christians from putting forward those precepts and transforming the world by them (Justin Martyr, Dialogue With Trypho, 10). What about the major improvement in literacy that we've seen over the centuries? Too unrealistic. Nobody should have ever tried to accomplish it. We should have just been satisfied with lower literacy rates. After all, most people aren't cut out, wired, gifted, or whatever other language you want to use to handle something like literacy. So, we shouldn't even try. Or how about the recent major decline in poverty across the world? Don't even attempt it. It obviously won't ever happen. Don't even try. And while you're being so apathetic and lazy, add things like the advances we've seen in political freedom, technology, and medicine to the list. Those things won't ever happen either. Don't even attempt it.
Really, though, people are often capable of not just more than they're currently doing, but even much more. That's true in apologetics and in a lot of other contexts in life. There are many contexts in which we don't need to keep the bar where it is or lower it. We need to raise it, and we need to raise it a lot. The fact that people initially resist that raising of the bar doesn't prove that they're incapable of meeting the higher standard. Often, what it proves is that they're sinful and that we need to be vigilant and diligent in keeping the standard high.
Where would the world be today if that kind of mindset had been adopted by the people who changed the world for the better in previous generations? Why did Jesus deliver the Sermon on the Mount? His standards were too high. He shouldn't have expected so much from people. "I am aware that your precepts in the so-called Gospel are so wonderful and so great, that I suspect no one can keep them", said Trypho, but that didn't keep Jesus and the early Christians from putting forward those precepts and transforming the world by them (Justin Martyr, Dialogue With Trypho, 10). What about the major improvement in literacy that we've seen over the centuries? Too unrealistic. Nobody should have ever tried to accomplish it. We should have just been satisfied with lower literacy rates. After all, most people aren't cut out, wired, gifted, or whatever other language you want to use to handle something like literacy. So, we shouldn't even try. Or how about the recent major decline in poverty across the world? Don't even attempt it. It obviously won't ever happen. Don't even try. And while you're being so apathetic and lazy, add things like the advances we've seen in political freedom, technology, and medicine to the list. Those things won't ever happen either. Don't even attempt it.
Really, though, people are often capable of not just more than they're currently doing, but even much more. That's true in apologetics and in a lot of other contexts in life. There are many contexts in which we don't need to keep the bar where it is or lower it. We need to raise it, and we need to raise it a lot. The fact that people initially resist that raising of the bar doesn't prove that they're incapable of meeting the higher standard. Often, what it proves is that they're sinful and that we need to be vigilant and diligent in keeping the standard high.
Friday, November 20, 2020
Wednesday, November 11, 2020
Prayer Accompanied By Further Action
A good passage to memorize on the subject is Nehemiah 4:9. They prayed, then took up arms.
Friday, June 26, 2020
Opportunities And Responsibilities In Evangelism
You can't say much about evangelism without discussing a lot of other topics as well. There's a lot of overlap, which is part of what makes addressing evangelism so difficult.
I can't be exhaustive. This is just a post, not a book. And there are some issues I'm undecided on or too hesitant to address here.
One of the factors we should take into account when deciding how to handle matters related to evangelism is the principle Paul discusses in Colossians 4:5. Start where you have the most opportunity, then work out from there. The large majority of professing Christians in places like the United States don't make much use of the opportunities they have, even where the conditions are most favorable.
I can't be exhaustive. This is just a post, not a book. And there are some issues I'm undecided on or too hesitant to address here.
One of the factors we should take into account when deciding how to handle matters related to evangelism is the principle Paul discusses in Colossians 4:5. Start where you have the most opportunity, then work out from there. The large majority of professing Christians in places like the United States don't make much use of the opportunities they have, even where the conditions are most favorable.
Wednesday, September 13, 2017
Parents And Students Are More To Blame Than Schools
The Annenberg Public Policy Center just published their annual survey of how much Americans know about governmental issues. The results are ridiculous. Only 26% of Americans were able to name the three branches of government, for example.
The statement I just linked refers to a need for improvement in "civics education in the schools" and "press reporting". But they weren't surveying students. They weren't surveying illiterate peasants living in poverty in a third-world nation. They were surveying adults in the United States. And we're not talking about ignorance of the finer details of calculus or economic theory. Rather, we're talking about ignorance of matters as basic as naming the three branches of government and the contents of the First Amendment.
People only attend school for a minority of their time during a minority of their lives. What are they doing with their lives outside of school? Don't they have a responsibility to inform themselves? What about the influence of parents, grandparents, pastors, friends, etc.? When people are surrounded by intellectual negligence, and not just in schools and in the media, what results do you expect to get?
It's popular in Christian and politically conservative circles to blame schools and the media to an inordinate degree. Meanwhile, parents are spending absurd amounts of time on housework, trivial television programs, vulgar movies, sports, and ridiculous books, with few of them even caring much about problems like the ones Annenberg highlights. Yet, we're supposed to think the main problem is with schools. Or the media. Or Hollywood. Or the music industry. Or some combination of such factors. They're part of the problem, but it goes much deeper than that.
The statement I just linked refers to a need for improvement in "civics education in the schools" and "press reporting". But they weren't surveying students. They weren't surveying illiterate peasants living in poverty in a third-world nation. They were surveying adults in the United States. And we're not talking about ignorance of the finer details of calculus or economic theory. Rather, we're talking about ignorance of matters as basic as naming the three branches of government and the contents of the First Amendment.
People only attend school for a minority of their time during a minority of their lives. What are they doing with their lives outside of school? Don't they have a responsibility to inform themselves? What about the influence of parents, grandparents, pastors, friends, etc.? When people are surrounded by intellectual negligence, and not just in schools and in the media, what results do you expect to get?
It's popular in Christian and politically conservative circles to blame schools and the media to an inordinate degree. Meanwhile, parents are spending absurd amounts of time on housework, trivial television programs, vulgar movies, sports, and ridiculous books, with few of them even caring much about problems like the ones Annenberg highlights. Yet, we're supposed to think the main problem is with schools. Or the media. Or Hollywood. Or the music industry. Or some combination of such factors. They're part of the problem, but it goes much deeper than that.
Thursday, June 29, 2017
Recentering the "freewill" debate
The most salient change I would make, although perhaps not the philosophically most important one, is that I would not now use the phrase ‘free will’. In fact, I would not use even the adjective ‘free’—I would not speak of free actions, free agents, or free choices. Nor would I use the adverb ‘freely’ and the noun ‘freedom’. In my view, these words have little meaning beyond that which the philosopher who uses them explicitly gives them, and yet philosophers persist in arguing about what they do or should mean. They enter into disputes about what “free will” and “free choices” and “acting freely” and “freedom” really are. These philosophers have fallen prey to what I may call verbal essentialism. That is to say, it is essential to their discussions that they involve certain words: ‘free’, ‘freely’, ‘freedom’. … It would be impossible to translate their discussions into language that did not involve those words. Peter van Inwagen, The Harvard Review of Philosophy (2015), 22:16-17.
http://andrewmbailey.com/pvi/Thoughts_on_Essay.pdf
Calvinist/Arminian debates often go like this: Arminians say they believe in freewill, and they deny that Calvinists believe in freewill. Calvinists typically reply that they believe in freewill, too, they just have a different concept of freewill. But should we frame the debate in terms of freedom, viz. Can agents whose actions are determined or predetermined be "free"?
The problem with that framework is that what philosophers are typically after in this debate is a different question. Not, "Are we free?" but "Are we morally responsible?"
Now, libertarian freedom is often invoked as a necessary condition for praiseworthy or blameworthy actions. I'm not suggesting that we can avoid the issue of freedom in debating the nature of moral responsibility.
Yet for analytical clarity, we should distinguish between the primary issue and secondary issues. Whether or not we're morally responsible is the primary issue, the starting-point, while the question of what conditions are necessary and sufficient for an agent to be morally responsible, is secondary inasmuch as explanations are attempts to ground it–unless it is groundless (i.e. uncaused). Casting the issue in terms of freewill gets us off on the wrong foot. We need to recenter the debate.
Because "freedom" is a cipher, both sides explicate the concept of freedom. For instance, libertarians unpack that in terms of ultimate sourcehood and/or ability to access to alternate possibilities, &c, while Fischer appeals to regulative control and guidance control.
But in that event, "freedom" does no work. That's just a verbal placeholder. It's the underlying categories that do the work. So why not drop the ambiguous or opaque word "freedom" and go straight to examination of the categories?
An exception would be the relation between freedom and foreknowledge, where the primary issue isn't moral responsibility, but something else.
Friday, April 08, 2016
Saturday, January 16, 2016
The Republicans' Self-Inflicted Wounds
Steve has linked some of Mark Levin's comments on the New York values controversy. I agree with the general thrust of Levin's comments, and I think they were worth linking. I want to add the following, though.
Saturday, December 12, 2015
Voters Are More Guilty Than The Establishment
Here's something I recently wrote in an email, in case anybody would find it helpful. I'm responding to an article by Ben Shapiro :
Shapiro's argument doesn't make much sense. There are major obstacles to Trump's winning the nomination, which Shapiro doesn't even mention. His negative numbers among Republicans are unusually high, and his negatives are even worse outside of the party. When it's still 2015, there's still a double-digit number of candidates running, and most of the negative ads against Trump haven't even started airing yet, his consistently getting in the twenties or thirties in polls doesn't amount to much.
The phrase "the establishment" is vague and defined and redefined in so many ways. If everybody would stop using the term, I think we'd be better off for it. The phrase didn't have much value to begin with, and it's now been overused to an absurd degree.
Is Karl Rove part of the establishment? He recently told Michael Medved that he includes Cruz among the candidates he considers to have the stature of a president. He didn't include Trump. What about the National Review writers who have been most vocal in opposing Trump? I've repeatedly seen them make positive comments about Cruz and comment on how he's an acceptable choice and better than Trump. Shapiro's claim that Cruz is the candidate the establishment is most opposed to strikes me as ridiculous. They'd prefer Cruz to Trump.
And given how conservative Rubio is, I'd say that the widespread support for him among people often labeled as part of the establishment goes a long way in demonstrating that the establishment isn't opposed to conservatism. Their problem with candidates like Trump and Carson (and Cruz to a lesser extent) isn't that they're conservative. (As if Trump is too conservative for them.) Rather, they're concerned about electability. And they should be. Shame on the people who either aren't concerned about it or are far less concerned than they ought to be.
There are some problems with many of the people who are often labeled as part of the establishment. But the problems are often exaggerated, and a lot of their critics have some problems of their own.
Shapiro's comments about talk radio are misleading. He writes:
"Members of Republican media are now attacking others in Republican media who don’t see Trump as the gravest threat to the Republican Party or the republic; they bash Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin for focusing in on the left and the media, rather than on stopping Trump."
The problem critics see with people like Limbaugh and Levin isn't that they "don’t see Trump as the gravest threat to the Republican Party or the republic" and "focus in on the left and the media". Rather, the problem is along the lines of what Guy Benson describes in his article I recently linked on Triablogue.
Then there's Shapiro's failure to criticize the people most responsible for choosing our candidates and the people most responsible for making poor choices in the past: the voters. Who chose McCain and Romney? Voters made the choice more than anybody else. And they rejected candidates like Mike Huckabee, Fred Thompson, Tim Pawlenty, and Rick Perry in the process. I can see rejecting some of them. But choosing Romney over Pawlenty was a mistake. That wasn't the establishment's mistake. It was the mistake of the voters, and talk radio and other critics of the establishment were at the forefront of making that mistake happen. They were focused on Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, and other weaker candidates while they gave Pawlenty almost no support. They rejected Rick Perry for far less significant problems than the ones many of them are willing to overlook in Trump.
For a party that puts so much emphasis on personal responsibility, Republicans spend a remarkable amount of time blaming a vague establishment and not much time holding the voters responsible for their mistakes.
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Abimelek the Puppet and Arminianism's Unloving God
Gen. 20:3 But God came to Abimelek in a dream one night and said to him, “You are as good as dead because of the woman you have taken; she is a married woman.”
4 Now Abimelek had not gone near her, so he said, “Lord, will you destroy an innocent nation? 5 Did he not say to me, ‘She is my sister,’ and didn’t she also say, ‘He is my brother’? I have done this with a clear conscience and clean hands.”
6 Then God said to him in the dream, “Yes, I know you did this with a clear conscience, and so I have kept you from sinning against me. That is why I did not let you touch her."
4 Now Abimelek had not gone near her, so he said, “Lord, will you destroy an innocent nation? 5 Did he not say to me, ‘She is my sister,’ and didn’t she also say, ‘He is my brother’? I have done this with a clear conscience and clean hands.”
6 Then God said to him in the dream, “Yes, I know you did this with a clear conscience, and so I have kept you from sinning against me. That is why I did not let you touch her."
Poor Abimelek probably thought he freely refrained from touching her, thought that he could have touched her but didn't. Abimelek might have even thought his future regarding Sarah was a garden of forking paths. His common sense belief didn't match reality, though; in fact, he ceased to be a moral agent at this moment. At this moment God ontologically changed Abimelek's flesh into felt, securing strings on him, and controlling him via "meticulous, anal retentive providence." At this moment, Abimelek became a puppet.
What's more unfortunate for some theologies is that it appears God can keep people from sinning without creating a "massively different world" from what we see now. Either he violated Abimelek's libertarian free will doing what he did, or he did not. If he did, he was able to do so conspicuously (contrary to the claim of some Arminian apologists). If he did not, then why doesn't the Arminian God do this more often? He can keep Abimelek from sinning against God and from touching Sarah while not keeping David Westerfield from sinning against God and from touching Danielle van Dam? Did God love Sarah more than Danielle? Did he like Abimelek more than Westerfield? What love is this!?
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Does Permission Exculpate God?
Arminians often attempt to insulate God from moral complaints against His sovereignty by falling back to the “permissive” argument. For example, in dealing with the problem of evil, they assert that God does not deterministically cause any evil to occur, but instead He merely allows it to happen, and because he permits it instead of ordaining it, He is somehow no longer culpable. On Triablogue, we’ve often discussed this issue and why it isn’t defensible on philosophical grounds for an Arminian to claim that permission could exempt God from culpability. In the process, we’ve also made many exegetical arguments for our position as well. I do not wish to rehash old ground anew, but instead to add yet one more Scriptural proof that permission alone is insufficient to exempt someone from culpability. And that Scriptural proof is found in the Law of Moses.
Exodus 21:28 states:
What is clear from this verse is that the owner of the ox is not held responsible for the actions of the ox. Presumably, this would be due to the fact that the ox’s will is not the owner’s will, and that is why the owner is not liable. The owner did not wish for the ox to kill anyone, the owner did not plan for this, therefore the owner is not culpable.
Thus far, it looks like this would be evidence for the position that if God permits something evil to occur He is not culpable for that. However, the very next verse reads:
It seems to me that this verse neutralizes not only all Arminian arguments designed to exculpate God, but it even neutralizes Open Theist arguments. For the Arminian is now in the unenviable position of acknowledging that God has exhaustive foreknowledge and knows not only which ox will gore which person, but also which person will murder another. And if the owner of an ox is culpable when he knows full well that he has a dangerous ox, then God surely must likewise be culpable if He knows full well that a created being He put on Earth is a danger to others. Likewise, the Open Theist is not let off the hook because even if God did not know at first the human beings were going to commit evil, once they did and He did not take measures to restrain that evil, then this verse would show God is just as guilty as if He Himself did the evil. So clearly, the argument that “permission” exculpates is invalidated by the Law itself.
Now for the record, and because I know that some will misread what I write here, I am not saying that it really is the case that God is culpable for evil and that Arminians will just need to learn to deal with it like we icky determinists do. Rather, I am only saying that one cannot escape to “permission” to get God “off the hook” given the typical starting point of morality that most Arminians (and not only Arminians, mind you) have. Since I am a Divine Command Theorist, then my own position doesn’t start where theirs does. Indeed, I don’t have to use “permission” to get God “off the hook” because God is never on the hook to begin with under DCT.
Exodus 21:28 states:
When an ox gores a man or a woman to death, the ox shall be stoned, and its flesh shall not be eaten, but the owner of the ox shall not be liable.Now an ox is an animal, and as such it as a rudimentary will. It is not an inanimate object, in other words, and it will often do things that the owner does not wish for it to do. Anyone who has ever owned livestock—or even pets, for that matter—knows of the frustration of wanting an animal to do something and the animal not doing it.
What is clear from this verse is that the owner of the ox is not held responsible for the actions of the ox. Presumably, this would be due to the fact that the ox’s will is not the owner’s will, and that is why the owner is not liable. The owner did not wish for the ox to kill anyone, the owner did not plan for this, therefore the owner is not culpable.
Thus far, it looks like this would be evidence for the position that if God permits something evil to occur He is not culpable for that. However, the very next verse reads:
But if the ox has been accustomed to gore in the past, and its owner has been warned but has not kept it in, and it kills a man or a woman, the ox shall be stoned, and its owner also shall be put to death.And here we see that the escape to “permission” cannot remove culpability from God. For we see that it is still the case that the owner of the ox does not will that the ox gore anyone, and we still see that the owner does not plan this event to happen, yet nevertheless the owner is held responsible with the same penalty imposed as if he had murdered the man himself. Why is the owner culpable? Because he did not take measures needed to reign in an ox “accustomed to gore.” He is negligent for not stopping that which he knew was dangerous, and therefore he receives the same penalty as if he had personally acted instead of the ox.
It seems to me that this verse neutralizes not only all Arminian arguments designed to exculpate God, but it even neutralizes Open Theist arguments. For the Arminian is now in the unenviable position of acknowledging that God has exhaustive foreknowledge and knows not only which ox will gore which person, but also which person will murder another. And if the owner of an ox is culpable when he knows full well that he has a dangerous ox, then God surely must likewise be culpable if He knows full well that a created being He put on Earth is a danger to others. Likewise, the Open Theist is not let off the hook because even if God did not know at first the human beings were going to commit evil, once they did and He did not take measures to restrain that evil, then this verse would show God is just as guilty as if He Himself did the evil. So clearly, the argument that “permission” exculpates is invalidated by the Law itself.
Now for the record, and because I know that some will misread what I write here, I am not saying that it really is the case that God is culpable for evil and that Arminians will just need to learn to deal with it like we icky determinists do. Rather, I am only saying that one cannot escape to “permission” to get God “off the hook” given the typical starting point of morality that most Arminians (and not only Arminians, mind you) have. Since I am a Divine Command Theorist, then my own position doesn’t start where theirs does. Indeed, I don’t have to use “permission” to get God “off the hook” because God is never on the hook to begin with under DCT.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Eli the priest
Robert, on May 26, 2010 at 8:21 pm Said:
Steven (2) makes some very good points which the determinist Steven[Nemes] completely ignores and refuses to deal with….Steven (2) also makes the biblical point that the parents are not responsible for the sins of their children: each is responsible for his own actions and his own sins. Determinists such as Steven [Nemes] seem to ignore this biblical truth clearly presented by the Ezekiel passage which Steven (2) cites.
http://arminianperspectives.wordpress.com/2010/05/19/fallacies-of-calvinist-apologetics-fallacy-8-calvinism-doesnt-charge-god-with-the-authorship-of-sin/#comment-4643
1 Sam 2:12-17,27-36
12Now the sons of Eli were worthless men. They did not know the LORD. 13The custom of the priests with the people was that when any man offered sacrifice, the priest’s servant would come, while the meat was boiling, with a three-pronged fork in his hand, 14and he would thrust it into the pan or kettle or cauldron or pot. All that the fork brought up the priest would take for himself. This is what they did at Shiloh to all the Israelites who came there. 15Moreover, before the fat was burned, the priest’s servant would come and say to the man who was sacrificing, "Give meat for the priest to roast, for he will not accept boiled meat from you but only raw." 16And if the man said to him, "Let them burn the fat first, and then take as much as you wish," he would say, "No, you must give it now, and if not, I will take it by force." 17Thus the sin of the young men was very great in the sight of the LORD, for the men treated the offering of the LORD with contempt.
27And there came a man of God to Eli and said to him, "Thus the LORD has said, 'Did I indeed reveal myself to the house of your father when they were in Egypt subject to the house of Pharaoh? 28 Did I choose him out of all the tribes of Israel to be my priest, to go up to my altar, to burn incense, to wear an ephod before me? I gave to the house of your father all my offerings by fire from the people of Israel. 29Why then do you scorn my sacrifices and my offerings that I commanded, and honor your sons above me by fattening yourselves on the choicest parts of every offering of my people Israel?' 30Therefore the LORD, the God of Israel, declares: 'I promised that your house and the house of your father should go in and out before me forever,' but now the LORD declares: 'Far be it from me, for those who honor me I will honor, and those who despise me shall be lightly esteemed. 31Behold, the days are coming when I will cut off your strength and the strength of your father’s house, so that there will not be an old man in your house. 32Then in distress you will look with envious eye on all the prosperity that shall be bestowed on Israel, and there shall not be an old man in your house forever. 33The only one of you whom I shall not cut off from my altar shall be spared to weep his eyes out to grieve his heart, and all the descendants of your house shall die by the sword of men. 34 And this that shall come upon your two sons, Hophni and Phinehas, shall be the sign to you: both of them shall die on the same day. 35 And I will raise up for myself a faithful priest, who shall do according to what is in my heart and in my mind. And I will build him a sure house, and he shall go in and out before my anointed forever. 36And everyone who is left in your house shall come to implore him for a piece of silver or a loaf of bread and shall say, "Please put me in one of the priests’ places, that I may eat a morsel of bread.'"
Steven (2) makes some very good points which the determinist Steven[Nemes] completely ignores and refuses to deal with….Steven (2) also makes the biblical point that the parents are not responsible for the sins of their children: each is responsible for his own actions and his own sins. Determinists such as Steven [Nemes] seem to ignore this biblical truth clearly presented by the Ezekiel passage which Steven (2) cites.
http://arminianperspectives.wordpress.com/2010/05/19/fallacies-of-calvinist-apologetics-fallacy-8-calvinism-doesnt-charge-god-with-the-authorship-of-sin/#comment-4643
1 Sam 2:12-17,27-36
12Now the sons of Eli were worthless men. They did not know the LORD. 13The custom of the priests with the people was that when any man offered sacrifice, the priest’s servant would come, while the meat was boiling, with a three-pronged fork in his hand, 14and he would thrust it into the pan or kettle or cauldron or pot. All that the fork brought up the priest would take for himself. This is what they did at Shiloh to all the Israelites who came there. 15Moreover, before the fat was burned, the priest’s servant would come and say to the man who was sacrificing, "Give meat for the priest to roast, for he will not accept boiled meat from you but only raw." 16And if the man said to him, "Let them burn the fat first, and then take as much as you wish," he would say, "No, you must give it now, and if not, I will take it by force." 17Thus the sin of the young men was very great in the sight of the LORD, for the men treated the offering of the LORD with contempt.
27And there came a man of God to Eli and said to him, "Thus the LORD has said, 'Did I indeed reveal myself to the house of your father when they were in Egypt subject to the house of Pharaoh? 28 Did I choose him out of all the tribes of Israel to be my priest, to go up to my altar, to burn incense, to wear an ephod before me? I gave to the house of your father all my offerings by fire from the people of Israel. 29Why then do you scorn my sacrifices and my offerings that I commanded, and honor your sons above me by fattening yourselves on the choicest parts of every offering of my people Israel?' 30Therefore the LORD, the God of Israel, declares: 'I promised that your house and the house of your father should go in and out before me forever,' but now the LORD declares: 'Far be it from me, for those who honor me I will honor, and those who despise me shall be lightly esteemed. 31Behold, the days are coming when I will cut off your strength and the strength of your father’s house, so that there will not be an old man in your house. 32Then in distress you will look with envious eye on all the prosperity that shall be bestowed on Israel, and there shall not be an old man in your house forever. 33The only one of you whom I shall not cut off from my altar shall be spared to weep his eyes out to grieve his heart, and all the descendants of your house shall die by the sword of men. 34 And this that shall come upon your two sons, Hophni and Phinehas, shall be the sign to you: both of them shall die on the same day. 35 And I will raise up for myself a faithful priest, who shall do according to what is in my heart and in my mind. And I will build him a sure house, and he shall go in and out before my anointed forever. 36And everyone who is left in your house shall come to implore him for a piece of silver or a loaf of bread and shall say, "Please put me in one of the priests’ places, that I may eat a morsel of bread.'"
Saturday, June 06, 2009
A Divided Front: Libertarians at odds with each other on the doctrine of PAP
In the many debates we've had with Arminians here, every singly one of them has brought up PAP (principle of alternative possibilities) as necessary for moral responsibility, and an obvious intuition that only one committed to determinism could deny.
However, many indeterminists deny PAP. Increasingly more and more, in fact.
Here's a few representative samples:
William Lane Craig: "But as you note, I’m a libertarian who thinks that causal determinism is incompatible with freedom. That doesn’t imply that I hold to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP), which states that a free agent has in a set of circumstances the ability to choose A or not-A. I’m persuaded that so long as an agent’s choice is not causally determined, it doesn’t matter if he can actually make a choice contrary to how he does choose. Suppose that God has decided to create you in a set of circumstances because He knew that in those circumstances you would make an undetermined choice to do A. Suppose further that had God instead known that if you were in those circumstances you would have made an undetermined choice to do not-A, then God would not have created you in those circumstances (maybe it would have loused up His providential plan!). In that case you do not have the ability in those circumstances to make the choice of not-A, but nevertheless your choice of A is, I think, clearly free, for it is causally unconstrained—it you who determines that A will be done. So the ability to do otherwise is not a necessary condition of free choice."
http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5827
Michael Bergmann: "One thing that makes Frankfurt’s proposed counterexample to PAP interesting is that it is supposed to be successful even if the sort of moral responsibility at issue is fairly robust – i.e., of the sort in which an incompatibilist and not merely a compatibilist is interested. Recently, however, Frankfurt’s criticism of PAP has come under attack precisely because it (supposedly) fails when the focus is full-blooded moral responsibility of the sort that incompatibilists care about.[ii] The suggestion is that such counterexamples to PAP are successful only if one assumes the falsity of incompatibilism.
In this paper, I will defend Frankfurt’s criticism against this charge. My aim is to design a Frankfurt-style counterexample to PAP that doesn’t take for granted the falsity of incompatibilism."
http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~bergmann/frankfurt.htm
David Hunt: "For example, if I murder someone, and in so doing satisfy the most exacting conditions for free will, except that an irresistible power (a demon, crazed neurologist, etc.) would have forced me to murder the person if I hadn’t done so on my own, this last factor does not appear to mitigate my responsibility in the least. Here no alternative to murder is available to me (so PAP is unsatisfied), but I am nevertheless free and responsible for what I do, since the factor excluding alternatives makes no causal contribution to my actions, and indeed makes no difference to what actually happens. The same can be said in cases involving divine foreknowledge. God’s foreknowledge of the murder may make it unavoidable, but it does so without making any causal contribution to murder, which would have occurred just as it did in the absence of divine foreknowledge."
--David Hunt, ‘On Augustine’s Way Out’, Faith and Philosophy, Volume 16, Number 1, (January 1999), 17.
Linda Zagzebski: some philosophers have argued that PAP is false even if we have libertarian free will. I have given such an argument (Zagzebski 1991), as has David Hunt (1999). Hunt (1996b, 1999) argues that the rejection of PAP from the perspective of a defender of libertarian freedom can be found in Augustine, but even if that is true, it is not a position historically associated with Augustine. The literature that clearly distinguishes the claim that free will requires alternate possibilities from the claim that free will requires the falsehood of determinism is contemporary. The former is a thesis about events in counterfactual circumstances, whereas the latter is a thesis about the locus of causal control in the actual circumstances. Aside from the foreknowledge literature, support for the rejection of PAP from the perspective of a free will/determinism incompatibilist can be found in Stump (1990, 1996), Zagzebski (2000), and Pereboom (2000).
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/free-will-foreknowledge/
Eleonore Stump: "Some defenders of the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP) have responded to the challenge of Frankfurt-style counterexamples (FSCs) to PAP by arguing that there remains a flicker of freedom -- that is, an alternative possibility for action -- left to the agent in FSCs. I argue that the flicker of freedom strategy is unsuccessful. The strategy requires the supposition that doing an act-on-one''s-own is itself an action of sorts. I argue that either this supposition is confused and leads to counter-intuitive results; or, if the supposition is acceptable, then it is possible to use it to construct a FSC in which there is no flicker of freedom at all. Either way, the flicker of freedom strategy is ineffective against FSCs. Since the flicker of freedom strategy is arguably the best defense of PAP, I conclude that FSCs are successful in showing that PAP is false. An agent can act with moral responsibility without having alternative possibilities available to her."
--Eleonore Stump, 'Alternative possibilities and moral responsibility: The flicker of freedom.' (1999) Journal of Ethics 3 (4):299-324.
However, many indeterminists deny PAP. Increasingly more and more, in fact.
Here's a few representative samples:
William Lane Craig: "But as you note, I’m a libertarian who thinks that causal determinism is incompatible with freedom. That doesn’t imply that I hold to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP), which states that a free agent has in a set of circumstances the ability to choose A or not-A. I’m persuaded that so long as an agent’s choice is not causally determined, it doesn’t matter if he can actually make a choice contrary to how he does choose. Suppose that God has decided to create you in a set of circumstances because He knew that in those circumstances you would make an undetermined choice to do A. Suppose further that had God instead known that if you were in those circumstances you would have made an undetermined choice to do not-A, then God would not have created you in those circumstances (maybe it would have loused up His providential plan!). In that case you do not have the ability in those circumstances to make the choice of not-A, but nevertheless your choice of A is, I think, clearly free, for it is causally unconstrained—it you who determines that A will be done. So the ability to do otherwise is not a necessary condition of free choice."
http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5827
Michael Bergmann: "One thing that makes Frankfurt’s proposed counterexample to PAP interesting is that it is supposed to be successful even if the sort of moral responsibility at issue is fairly robust – i.e., of the sort in which an incompatibilist and not merely a compatibilist is interested. Recently, however, Frankfurt’s criticism of PAP has come under attack precisely because it (supposedly) fails when the focus is full-blooded moral responsibility of the sort that incompatibilists care about.[ii] The suggestion is that such counterexamples to PAP are successful only if one assumes the falsity of incompatibilism.
In this paper, I will defend Frankfurt’s criticism against this charge. My aim is to design a Frankfurt-style counterexample to PAP that doesn’t take for granted the falsity of incompatibilism."
http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~bergmann/frankfurt.htm
David Hunt: "For example, if I murder someone, and in so doing satisfy the most exacting conditions for free will, except that an irresistible power (a demon, crazed neurologist, etc.) would have forced me to murder the person if I hadn’t done so on my own, this last factor does not appear to mitigate my responsibility in the least. Here no alternative to murder is available to me (so PAP is unsatisfied), but I am nevertheless free and responsible for what I do, since the factor excluding alternatives makes no causal contribution to my actions, and indeed makes no difference to what actually happens. The same can be said in cases involving divine foreknowledge. God’s foreknowledge of the murder may make it unavoidable, but it does so without making any causal contribution to murder, which would have occurred just as it did in the absence of divine foreknowledge."
--David Hunt, ‘On Augustine’s Way Out’, Faith and Philosophy, Volume 16, Number 1, (January 1999), 17.
Linda Zagzebski: some philosophers have argued that PAP is false even if we have libertarian free will. I have given such an argument (Zagzebski 1991), as has David Hunt (1999). Hunt (1996b, 1999) argues that the rejection of PAP from the perspective of a defender of libertarian freedom can be found in Augustine, but even if that is true, it is not a position historically associated with Augustine. The literature that clearly distinguishes the claim that free will requires alternate possibilities from the claim that free will requires the falsehood of determinism is contemporary. The former is a thesis about events in counterfactual circumstances, whereas the latter is a thesis about the locus of causal control in the actual circumstances. Aside from the foreknowledge literature, support for the rejection of PAP from the perspective of a free will/determinism incompatibilist can be found in Stump (1990, 1996), Zagzebski (2000), and Pereboom (2000).
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/free-will-foreknowledge/
Eleonore Stump: "Some defenders of the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP) have responded to the challenge of Frankfurt-style counterexamples (FSCs) to PAP by arguing that there remains a flicker of freedom -- that is, an alternative possibility for action -- left to the agent in FSCs. I argue that the flicker of freedom strategy is unsuccessful. The strategy requires the supposition that doing an act-on-one''s-own is itself an action of sorts. I argue that either this supposition is confused and leads to counter-intuitive results; or, if the supposition is acceptable, then it is possible to use it to construct a FSC in which there is no flicker of freedom at all. Either way, the flicker of freedom strategy is ineffective against FSCs. Since the flicker of freedom strategy is arguably the best defense of PAP, I conclude that FSCs are successful in showing that PAP is false. An agent can act with moral responsibility without having alternative possibilities available to her."
--Eleonore Stump, 'Alternative possibilities and moral responsibility: The flicker of freedom.' (1999) Journal of Ethics 3 (4):299-324.
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
Why Classical Arminianism Needs to Become Open Theistic to Use Rebutting Defeaters to Frankfurt Counter Examples
I take it that Classical Arminianism at least affirms the thesis that God has exhaustive foreknowledge, where this means he knows the future actions of libertarian free (indeterministically free) agents.
Frequently, in debates against Calvinists, Classical Arminians claim that Calvinism cannot be true by the conjunction of a biblical premise with an extra-biblical premise. First, the biblical premise. (1) The Bible clearly teaches that men are morally responsible for their actions (all sides agree to this). Now the extra-biblical premise (Stuart Goetz recently told me via email that you cannot prove a libertarian action theory strictly from the Bible and people who think you can are sophomoric). (2) To be morally responsible for your actions requires the ability to do otherwise, otherwise known as, the principle of alternative possibility (PAP). To get a handle on PAPs I will cite some expressions of this intuition given by prominent libertarians.
The below expressions of PAP are taken from, Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibility: Essays on the Importance of Alternative Possibilities, (eds. Widerker & Mckenna, Ashgate, 2006):
Since PAPs are inconsistent with there being only one future given a past divine decree (determinism), Arminians feel that, based on the intuitive strength PAPs yield, a Calvinism that posits a divine determinism cannot be the case.
Yet, there is a response. Many determinists have claimed that there are equally strong intuitions against PAP brought out by what are called in the literature, Frankfurt Counter Examples. Many libertarian free will theorists have agreed. For example, David Copp, a libertarian, writes, "Frankfurt's argument is troubling and puzzling because it brings intuitively plausible counterexamples against an intuitively plausible principle. It forces us to deal with clashing intuitions" (Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibility: Essays on the Importance of Alternative Possibilities, (eds. Widerker & Mckenna, Ashgate, 2006), p.265).
In a nutshell, Frankfurt Counter Examples propose some kind of controller that will ensure that an agent cannot do otherwise than some action A, if he were to physically try to, or even if he were about to think to try to do otherwise than A. As the story goes, though, the agent proceeds to A, and never even wavers, and so the controller does not need to "push the button" that will ensure he A's. So, the agent is morally responsible while being unable to do otherwise than A. There have been thousands of pages written on Frankfurt Counter Examples, this was intended as just an initial sketch. These counterexamples represent a defeater for PAPs, and thus a defeater to the objection to Calvinism based on the conjunction of the above (1) and (2).
Frankfurt examples seem to have escaped unscathed from almost every response to them, and thus it looks like the critique against Calvinism based on PAP has little merit, indeed, it looks false.
Yet, there are Arminians who still think Frankfurt Counter Examples do not falsify PAP. But, it seems that more and more libertarian philosophers have realized the strength of Franfurt Counter Examples. Things have funneled down to an objection libertarians think is pretty strong: the indeterminist world objection.
Bill Vallicella recently made mention of this objection, he writes:
The problem this has for the Classical Arminian should be obvious: it kicks out traditional views of foreknowledge. Another strong intuitions Calvinists have had (well, not just Calvinists, some libertarians too) is that foreknowledge is just as threatening to libertarian free will (though the argument to that conclusions runs slightly different that the determinism argument, mere foreknowledge of an event is not causation of that event). This is why both Calvinists and many non-classical Arminians have claimed that Open Theism (which, among other things, denies God's knowledge of the future actions of libertarian free agents) is the logical outworking of Arminianism. The recent objection to Frankfurt Counter Examples, the Kane-Widerker Objection, has only served to strengthen that intuition. (I should add, though I will not present the arguments, things are not at a stalemate here. Some, like Mele, have claimed that Frankfurt Counter Examples can work against even this objection. Frankfurt Counter Examples have been resilient, if anything, to various rebutting defeaters.)
Thus, it looks like the noose is tightening and Classical Arminianism will eventually be forced, logically, to the Open Theist position. On the other hand, they can drop the PAP objection to Calvinism (libertarian Dave Hunt does not hold to PAP, so that is another viable option). They would just lose a major weapon they have been wielding in the debate between the two systems. Only time will tell which one they will give.
Frequently, in debates against Calvinists, Classical Arminians claim that Calvinism cannot be true by the conjunction of a biblical premise with an extra-biblical premise. First, the biblical premise. (1) The Bible clearly teaches that men are morally responsible for their actions (all sides agree to this). Now the extra-biblical premise (Stuart Goetz recently told me via email that you cannot prove a libertarian action theory strictly from the Bible and people who think you can are sophomoric). (2) To be morally responsible for your actions requires the ability to do otherwise, otherwise known as, the principle of alternative possibility (PAP). To get a handle on PAPs I will cite some expressions of this intuition given by prominent libertarians.
The below expressions of PAP are taken from, Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibility: Essays on the Importance of Alternative Possibilities, (eds. Widerker & Mckenna, Ashgate, 2006):
- "PAP: An agent is morally responsible for performing a given action A only if he could have avoided performing it" (Widerker, p.53).
- "PAP: An agent S is morally responsible for its being the case that p only if S could have made it not the case that p." (Ginet, 75).
- "Frankfirt-style cases (FSCs) were introduced to undermine 'the principle of alternative possibilities' or PAP. They were designed to show that a person could be morally responsible even though the person had no alternative possibilities (APs) or could not have done otherwise." [Kane, p. 91, see fn. 4 for an elaboration. Kane agrees that in *particular* cases FSCs show that an agent was morally responsible even though he could not have done otherwise just in case he had some libertarian free choices in his past that shaped his character.]
- "PAP3: A person is (libertarian) free in what he has done (= A) only if there is something he did (= B) which is such that (i) he could have done otherwise than B and (ii) it is (at least in part) in virtue of his doing B that he is (libertarian) free in doing A" (Hunt, p.167). [NOTE: Hunt, though a libertarian nevertheless rejects the PAP constraint on moral responsibility.]
Since PAPs are inconsistent with there being only one future given a past divine decree (determinism), Arminians feel that, based on the intuitive strength PAPs yield, a Calvinism that posits a divine determinism cannot be the case.
Yet, there is a response. Many determinists have claimed that there are equally strong intuitions against PAP brought out by what are called in the literature, Frankfurt Counter Examples. Many libertarian free will theorists have agreed. For example, David Copp, a libertarian, writes, "Frankfurt's argument is troubling and puzzling because it brings intuitively plausible counterexamples against an intuitively plausible principle. It forces us to deal with clashing intuitions" (Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibility: Essays on the Importance of Alternative Possibilities, (eds. Widerker & Mckenna, Ashgate, 2006), p.265).
In a nutshell, Frankfurt Counter Examples propose some kind of controller that will ensure that an agent cannot do otherwise than some action A, if he were to physically try to, or even if he were about to think to try to do otherwise than A. As the story goes, though, the agent proceeds to A, and never even wavers, and so the controller does not need to "push the button" that will ensure he A's. So, the agent is morally responsible while being unable to do otherwise than A. There have been thousands of pages written on Frankfurt Counter Examples, this was intended as just an initial sketch. These counterexamples represent a defeater for PAPs, and thus a defeater to the objection to Calvinism based on the conjunction of the above (1) and (2).
Frankfurt examples seem to have escaped unscathed from almost every response to them, and thus it looks like the critique against Calvinism based on PAP has little merit, indeed, it looks false.
Yet, there are Arminians who still think Frankfurt Counter Examples do not falsify PAP. But, it seems that more and more libertarian philosophers have realized the strength of Franfurt Counter Examples. Things have funneled down to an objection libertarians think is pretty strong: the indeterminist world objection.
Bill Vallicella recently made mention of this objection, he writes:
But if we think about it, we see that these Frankfurt examples give an incompatibilist who believes in free will no reason to abandon PAP. Incompatibilists hold that (libertarian) free will and (causal) determinism are logically incompatible: they cannot both be true. So if free will exists, then determinism is false. And if determinism is false, then indeterminism is true. If indeterminism is true, then free choices are not determined by earlier events and the laws of nature. Jones choice is determined only at the instant at which Jones chooses, and is determined by Jones. How then could Black control Jones' choice? Suppose Black has all the powers of a Laplacean demon: in a deterministic universe he can predict any state from any temporally prior state. These powers won't help him, however, in an indeterministic universe. Before Jones chooses, Black cannot predict what he will choose. He cannot foresee (by observing electrical activity in Jones' brain, say, that Jones will choose A rather than B. Black must wait for Jones to choose before he can know what he chooses. But then it is too late for Black to interfere. Jones will have made a choice, and indeed one that he might not have made. For Black to ensure that Jones will make the choice that Black desires him to make, Black must act prior to the time at which Jones chooses so as to bring it about that Jones chooses as Black desires. But then Jones is not responsible for his choice. Jones cannot be responsible for his choice if Black is part of the cause of the choice. (Emphasis mine)Or, as Robert Kane puts it,
If free choices are undetermined then a Frankfurt controller could not ensure or control them without actually intervening and making the agent choose what the controller wants. In indeterministic worlds, as Widerker has put it, there will not be a reliable "tell" sign which lets the controller know that the agent will do. In other words, since no one can know what a free agent will do in an indeterministic world, the only way a choice (or action) controller could work is by forcing the choice he wants, which takes away responsibility for the agent (Kane, Introduction to Free Will, Oxford, 2005, p. 87-88), emphasis mine.So, the indeterminist world objection, OKA, the Kane-Widerker Objection, states that there can be no Frankfurt controller since it is impossible to know the future free actions of indeterministically free agents.
The problem this has for the Classical Arminian should be obvious: it kicks out traditional views of foreknowledge. Another strong intuitions Calvinists have had (well, not just Calvinists, some libertarians too) is that foreknowledge is just as threatening to libertarian free will (though the argument to that conclusions runs slightly different that the determinism argument, mere foreknowledge of an event is not causation of that event). This is why both Calvinists and many non-classical Arminians have claimed that Open Theism (which, among other things, denies God's knowledge of the future actions of libertarian free agents) is the logical outworking of Arminianism. The recent objection to Frankfurt Counter Examples, the Kane-Widerker Objection, has only served to strengthen that intuition. (I should add, though I will not present the arguments, things are not at a stalemate here. Some, like Mele, have claimed that Frankfurt Counter Examples can work against even this objection. Frankfurt Counter Examples have been resilient, if anything, to various rebutting defeaters.)
Thus, it looks like the noose is tightening and Classical Arminianism will eventually be forced, logically, to the Open Theist position. On the other hand, they can drop the PAP objection to Calvinism (libertarian Dave Hunt does not hold to PAP, so that is another viable option). They would just lose a major weapon they have been wielding in the debate between the two systems. Only time will tell which one they will give.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Compatibilism About Moral Responsibility
S is morally responsible for sinning even if S* caused S to sin.
Matt. 18:6 “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to sin, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were drowned in the depth of the sea.
Proceeding via Arminian rules of logical inference -
The dictionary defines cause as:
1. a person or thing that acts, happens, or exists in such a way that some specific thing happens as a result; the producer of an effect:
The common man understands cause to mean this.
This Bible was written to the common man.
The Bible teaches compatibilism.
Matt. 18:6 “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to sin, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were drowned in the depth of the sea.
Proceeding via Arminian rules of logical inference -
The dictionary defines cause as:
1. a person or thing that acts, happens, or exists in such a way that some specific thing happens as a result; the producer of an effect:
The common man understands cause to mean this.
This Bible was written to the common man.
The Bible teaches compatibilism.
Sunday, January 04, 2009
Bad Intentions
So, Arminians believe in libertarian free will. One question asked of this view is about what causes a choice. The question is perplexing, and there is no agreement among libertarian action theorists as to how to answer it.
A typical question is put this way: Mary chooses to go on vacation. She has two options she's weighing - Alaska or Hawaii. Mary chooses Alaska. That fits her budget better, the flights fit her busy schedule, the location is more alluring, her kids have always wanted to go there, fill in more blanks as you wish. Now, say Mary made this decision libertarianly free. That means, among other things, that nothing determined her choice. Nothing preceding the choice determined it. That means all the blanks above (some that were filled in with various desires and reasons) could have all been exactly the same as they were and Mary might have chosen Hawaii. Put differently, if we rewound the tape of Mary's life back to the point exactly before her choice and no further (thus keeping all the blanks the same) and then played the tape, Mary could just have well chose Hawaii (again, even given the same blanks we filled in). So, given this story, what is asked is, "What is it that explains why a libertarian free agent went one way over another?"
Now, in the literature this question has raised some interesting issues. For example, some have argued that libertarian free will doesn't afford us enough control to render a libertarian free agent morally responsible. Thus it would look like one of the main objections to compatibilism, viz., compatibalistically free agents cannot be held morally responsible for their actions, is actually shown to be a bigger problem for libertarianism. There are other issues raised. It's beyond the scope of this post to comment on them. I wish to raise another issue for Arminianism as it stems from some insights obtained from the above story about Mary.
Arminianism claims to believe in total depravity. I actually find it a superfluous concept since no human is actually totally depraved. They just would be if not for "prevenient grace" (another unbiblical doctrine fraught with its own problems). Actually, all humans are regenerate. They're only regenerate partially, though. Regenerate Lite. It's like this. Imagine a drink, let's call it Regenerade®. Now, people are naturally just an empty glass. But, no one is actually an empty glass. God flooded the world with Regenerade® such that all people are at least a glass half-full (or, "empty," if you like). Now, some people are filled to the brim with Regenerade®. They choose to "let go and let God" and so God "fills 'em up." But to get "filled up" you have to have at least some Regenerade® in your glass already. Since all people have an equal shot at filling up the glass, this means that all people have at least some Regenerade® in their glass. That's pretty much what they teach here.
Okay, now since total depravity is read counterfacuality, i.e, what all people would be if it weren't for God's flooding the earth with Regenerade®, we need to talk about scenarios that could happen. Total depravity is inherited from Adam, the federal head of the human race. So, let's bring back Mary. Mary is a counterfactual human living in a possible world W with no Regenerade®. When Mary makes a decision to * in W, she either has libertarian freedom or not. Since she would be morally responsible in W, then Arminians must say she had libertarian freedom - or, down goes almost all their object to Calvinism.
So Mary makes a choice to kill in W. She kills Harry. She hates Harry. She is jealous of Harry. She is annoyed by his voice. Fill in more blanks. Now, is she responsible? Arminians would have to say yes. So, rewind the tape. Given the same desires and reasons above, given every single event up until the choice was made to kill remains the same, Mary might just as easily choose not to kill. Is she responsible? This is vague.
She may not be civilly responsible since the state doesn't have the power or right to punish mere motives or desires, especially if kept private. But, she is still responsible to God for her motives. So, she must be free to not have sinful motives. Sinful desires. Even sinful inclinations. God will judge even the secret inclinations, thoughts, and desires of our heart. No one will have any such desire, thought, motive, or inclination in heaven.
So, either Mary is free to form sinful desires or not. But if she had no sinful thoughts, desires, motives, inclinations, etc., how could she plausibly be totally depraved? If she does not have the ability to get rid of the sinful heart from which sinful actions spring, she is still responsible for that heart. For that nature. But, she necessarily has said nature, and she didn't, in Kane's terminology, have a "crisis of the will" and self-form her will or character. She didn't will it but was willed it. She inherited it from Adam. Yet, in all of this, she is morally responsible. As top libertarian action theorist Robert Kane says, if an agent does indeterministically form her own will, then she cannot be a morally responsible agent. Totally depraved people do not form their own will. Their motives, desires, inclinations, etc., are evil and must be evil. And yet they are responsible.
And with that, most major objections from Arminians to Calvinism go down the drain.
A typical question is put this way: Mary chooses to go on vacation. She has two options she's weighing - Alaska or Hawaii. Mary chooses Alaska. That fits her budget better, the flights fit her busy schedule, the location is more alluring, her kids have always wanted to go there, fill in more blanks as you wish. Now, say Mary made this decision libertarianly free. That means, among other things, that nothing determined her choice. Nothing preceding the choice determined it. That means all the blanks above (some that were filled in with various desires and reasons) could have all been exactly the same as they were and Mary might have chosen Hawaii. Put differently, if we rewound the tape of Mary's life back to the point exactly before her choice and no further (thus keeping all the blanks the same) and then played the tape, Mary could just have well chose Hawaii (again, even given the same blanks we filled in). So, given this story, what is asked is, "What is it that explains why a libertarian free agent went one way over another?"
Now, in the literature this question has raised some interesting issues. For example, some have argued that libertarian free will doesn't afford us enough control to render a libertarian free agent morally responsible. Thus it would look like one of the main objections to compatibilism, viz., compatibalistically free agents cannot be held morally responsible for their actions, is actually shown to be a bigger problem for libertarianism. There are other issues raised. It's beyond the scope of this post to comment on them. I wish to raise another issue for Arminianism as it stems from some insights obtained from the above story about Mary.
Arminianism claims to believe in total depravity. I actually find it a superfluous concept since no human is actually totally depraved. They just would be if not for "prevenient grace" (another unbiblical doctrine fraught with its own problems). Actually, all humans are regenerate. They're only regenerate partially, though. Regenerate Lite. It's like this. Imagine a drink, let's call it Regenerade®. Now, people are naturally just an empty glass. But, no one is actually an empty glass. God flooded the world with Regenerade® such that all people are at least a glass half-full (or, "empty," if you like). Now, some people are filled to the brim with Regenerade®. They choose to "let go and let God" and so God "fills 'em up." But to get "filled up" you have to have at least some Regenerade® in your glass already. Since all people have an equal shot at filling up the glass, this means that all people have at least some Regenerade® in their glass. That's pretty much what they teach here.
Okay, now since total depravity is read counterfacuality, i.e, what all people would be if it weren't for God's flooding the earth with Regenerade®, we need to talk about scenarios that could happen. Total depravity is inherited from Adam, the federal head of the human race. So, let's bring back Mary. Mary is a counterfactual human living in a possible world W with no Regenerade®. When Mary makes a decision to * in W, she either has libertarian freedom or not. Since she would be morally responsible in W, then Arminians must say she had libertarian freedom - or, down goes almost all their object to Calvinism.
So Mary makes a choice to kill in W. She kills Harry. She hates Harry. She is jealous of Harry. She is annoyed by his voice. Fill in more blanks. Now, is she responsible? Arminians would have to say yes. So, rewind the tape. Given the same desires and reasons above, given every single event up until the choice was made to kill remains the same, Mary might just as easily choose not to kill. Is she responsible? This is vague.
She may not be civilly responsible since the state doesn't have the power or right to punish mere motives or desires, especially if kept private. But, she is still responsible to God for her motives. So, she must be free to not have sinful motives. Sinful desires. Even sinful inclinations. God will judge even the secret inclinations, thoughts, and desires of our heart. No one will have any such desire, thought, motive, or inclination in heaven.
So, either Mary is free to form sinful desires or not. But if she had no sinful thoughts, desires, motives, inclinations, etc., how could she plausibly be totally depraved? If she does not have the ability to get rid of the sinful heart from which sinful actions spring, she is still responsible for that heart. For that nature. But, she necessarily has said nature, and she didn't, in Kane's terminology, have a "crisis of the will" and self-form her will or character. She didn't will it but was willed it. She inherited it from Adam. Yet, in all of this, she is morally responsible. As top libertarian action theorist Robert Kane says, if an agent does indeterministically form her own will, then she cannot be a morally responsible agent. Totally depraved people do not form their own will. Their motives, desires, inclinations, etc., are evil and must be evil. And yet they are responsible.
And with that, most major objections from Arminians to Calvinism go down the drain.
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