Hi Paidion,
You make some good points, and I will eventually need to tie a lot more things together than I have so far. In the meantime, I need to make a couple of quick clarifications. You wrote:
It was not my intention to assume either that there are or even that there ever will be perfected saints in heaven. I merely chose an example from the traditional Christian idea that, once someone becomes fully sanctified and perfected in the next life, he or she can no longer even be tempted to do evil. As for the fallen angels, I see no reason to suppose that they were in fact morally perfect from the beginning; for if they were indeed like God in that respect, how could they have been tempted to sin in the first place? As Reinhold Niebuhr once commented, one must already be in a fallen (or an unperfected) condition before temptation is even possible; and as I read the story in Genesis, not even Adam and Eve were created morally perfect. If they had been, disobedience would have had no more appeal to them than eating “steaming hot dog poo” (in Cindy’s example that I borrow from another thread) would be to us.
You also wrote:
You are quite right about this example. So in the end we must attend to very specific circumstances, as DaveB has elsewhere pointed out. For although a loving mother may sometimes act out of character, there surely are, I should think, specific circumstances in which some loving mother would have the means available to torture her beloved child to death but would nonetheless find this utterly unthinkable and therefore psychologically impossible—that is, psychologically impossible in these precise circumstances. And even if things should change or a different set of circumstances should later arise in which such a horrific act would not be psychologically impossible for her, this would have no bearing on those circumstances in which it was indeed psychologically impossible for her. So the issue is whether she freely cares for her child in circumstances of the latter kind.
As Johnny asked:
You and I are definitely on the same page here, Johnny. I seriously doubt that you have a power of contrary choice in this matter at all. In fact, if we identify freedom with the power of contrary choice, then we seem to have precious little freedom, as the libertarian philosopher Peter van Inwagen himself once argued in an important paper. And his reasons were roughly the same as yours. But if we go with our ordinary paradigms of freedom, such as the loving mother who cares for her beloved baby or the honest banker who refuses a bribe, then we seem to have a good deal of freedom. So I guess the next question to ask is this: Is there a single and unified conception of freedom according to which (a) we freely sin or freely act wrongly only when it is psychologically possible to act otherwise and (b) we are nonetheless freest in our relation to God precisely when it is no longer psychologically possible to sin or to act wrongly?
Now here is a possible, albeit rather trivial, answer to my own question. Suppose we identify freedom not with the power of contrary choice, but simply with the power to act rightly or, if we think in terms of a theological context, the power to act obediently. That would take care of your concern, Paidion, concerning our responsibility for wrong or criminal acts; if I commit a murder, for example, I do so freely only if it is within my power to refrain from committing that murder. Such a conception would also support Kate’s suggestion that we should view true freedom, even as Jesus and Paul did, as a consequence of salvation. But even though such a conception definitely represents a step in the right direction, or at least so I believe, it does not yet deal adequately with Johnny’s worries about determinism, as he expressed them in his first post in this thread. If God should simply constitute us with a virtuous character, or if our virtuous acts, assuming there are such, should be the product of sufficient causes that existed in the distant past before we were even born, then neither Johnny nor I (nor many others) would regard them as genuinely free acts. So that brings us to a question of a kind that Chrisguy has posed in his latest post: Can we deal adequately with the determinism issue without, at the same time, conceding that freedom always requires a power of contrary choice?
Any further thoughts?
-Tom