Tom T, I took that post as a compliment while you reminded me of when I discussed Lewis with friends in the late 1980s. Thank you 
Tom,
If I understand your first suggested topic correctly (which I very well may not), the suggestion is that any non-determined action is the product of random chance, and nothing more than an anomaly. So, either what we do and think are determined by hypothetically predictable natural factors (or by God), or they are the result of an “accident” such as a data error, etc. Is that what the topic suggestion means?
If it is, and if the hypothesis is correct, then there’s probably no point in anyone discussing anything at all. It’s all predetermined reaction, or else chance randomness – sound and fury signifying nothing. 
As for #2 & #3, I wouldn’t object to discussing them (OR #1 for that matter), though I think I probably already agree with you on those two. I’ve enjoyed this discussion and though I haven’t contributed a ton, reading what everyone else has to say has been very helpful. Dave’s suggestion is a good one also though, and I think that might be an interesting thought path to follow. I’m not sure I know the answer, and that’s always at least one good reason to set off on a side-track.
I have to admit I’m intrigued by Dave’s suggestion as well Cindy. The role of our “moral intuition”–(“conscience” or what have you) is something I’d be interested in exploring further. Tom said earlier in a response to me that:
This is pretty much where I stand as well, I’ll admit, and I would think the decisions Dave describes not be qualitatively different, just that “moral influence” etc. may play a bigger role in the #2 and #3 scenarios (though certainly not absent from #1—especially if a career option I’m considering is say…that of a drug-dealer or a pimp.) 
Oh yes, Steve – did you get that book? Science and the Renewal of Belief? I just finally poked through chapter 20, and the whole time I was wondering what you and Melchi would think about it . . . I thought it very interesting.
It does not take the work of the Holy Spirit to make a career decision - we do the best we can with what we can afford, what our grades have been, our experience, who we know, etc.
It does take the work of the HS to trust in God, and for bearing the fruits of the Spirit, etc.
I DO think there is a qualitative difference between ‘everyday’ decisions and moral decisions, and decisions that can only be effected with the help of the HS. Deciding ‘for Christ’ is more than weighing circumstances and options, or whether to obey one’s conscience. As has been mentioned in this thread more than once, Christian belief is supernatural; a gift of grace - because we are unable to will it ourselves.
I don’t think I’m adding anything to the thread, just summing up a bit why I think that, as to the concept of ‘will’, we should ask - in which arena of action?
Hi Cindy, 
No haven’t gotten that book yet. I 'll probably get a new nook this weekend so will order it then.
Given your thoughts about “qualitative” differences in certain types of decisions, perhaps Tom will let us know his thoughts regarding that. Though, as I said, I don’t think there is a “qualitative” difference in the decisions, just a difference in the importance or influence of our moral intuition in particular types of decisions.
Edit: I also think that when we “feel” we’ve done wrong or made a “wrong” decision morally it is because we’ve made a decision contrary to what our moral intuition was telling us was “right.” In my opinion, because the weight of our other desires outweighed that which our moral intuition leaned toward. Also in my opinion, that doesn’t necessarily mean our moral intuition is right or directs us to the morally “right” decision all of the time. I don’t think our moral intuition is necessarily the “voice of God” or " leading of the Spirit" and, in fact, believe it can lead us to decisions that God wouldn’t approve of. In other words, I see it as a sense similar to eye-sight that can deceive us or be corrupted.
To be honest, Chris, I’m not quite sure what it might mean to “overcome the amount of ignorance” that someone has at a given moment. Could you perhaps give me an example that might help me out here?
In general, a rational agent removes ignorance by acquiring additional knowledge about the world through experience and experimentation, and this tends to be a time-consuming process. In a case where someone wrestles with temptation for a long period of time, it might be possible for such a person to make some relevant discoveries during the period of temptation. But one’s ignorance about the actual consequences of an action will not likely be removed until after one actually acts. According to the Genesis account, for example, Adam and Eve had no experiential knowledge of good and evil, no awareness of their nakedness, and no clear idea of what the consequences of their sin would be until after they had already eaten the forbidden fruit.
Does that address the question you had in mind? Quite frankly, I’m not sure it does. Anyway, let me know.
-Tom
Tom,
Was their ignorance such that it made refraining from sin impossible?
Hi Dave,
I love the fact that your keyboard seems to have slipped into a devout mode in point #3 with the expression “thy neighbor’s wife.” Reminds me of the slightly irreverent line where someone jokingly says: “Love thy neighbor, but don’t get caught!” Hope that’s not a violation of board rules!
Anyway, the conceptual question, remember, concerns the conditions under which someone acts freely, and the quasi-empirical question is whether the relevant conditions are in fact met on some specific occasion. I call this a “quasi-empirical question” because it may not always be possible, even in principle, to determine by empirical means whether the relevant conditions are in fact met. But in general, someone acts freely according to my conception whenever it is within one’s power to follow one’s own reasonable judgment concerning the best course of action. That would be true regardless of the situation in which one finds oneself.
Point #2 strikes me as a bit tricky, however, for this reason: Whereas 1 and 3 involve decisions about what to do, 2 involves a decision about what is true or at least about what principle to affirm. One could theoretically affirm the principle that it is wrong to kill in combat, I believe, and nonetheless think it best, all things considered (including the fact that one’s own life is at risk), to do so anyway. In a particular case, of course, one’s belief that killing is wrong in combat might also be a decisive factor in one’s choosing a particular course of action, such as that of becoming a conscientious objector. But whether it is a choice of career, a decision to kill in combat, or a decision to sleep with a neighbor’s wife (or husband!), one acts freely, on my account, provided that it is within one’s power to act in accordance with one’s own reasonable judgment concerning the best course of action.
Although that is my view, others may have a different view. So if you have a different view, feel free to express it.
Thanks Dave,
-Tom
Considering the volumes of philosophy written about free will since ancient times, this thread has a narrow focus. But yes, this is complex.
I’ll skip 1 for now because I suppose only an atheist or agnostic will argue that.
Per 2, your view that compelling evidence is compatible with the freedom that pertains to rational agents is not uncommon among proponents of libertarian free will.
Per 3, what is “fully realized freedom”? Did I miss that earlier in the this long and perhaps record breaking thread for this forum? Does that have anything to do with rejecting the possibility that creatures can make irrevocable decisions except perhaps if the reversal of the decision is logically impossible?
Jim - yep, this thread had a narrow focus, and then began to broaden out in a somewhat aimless fashion. Was just hoping to get a feel for the new directions. Tom is herding cats, and doing a good job.
No offense meant to ‘the cats’ - I’m one! 
Very good, Cindy. You state the problem very well. As I see it, a reasoning mind must operate on its own, so to speak, in a difficult to specify sense. But how are we to understand such an idea?
Once again, the place to start, perhaps, is with God himself. For just as a supremely perfect God would be the freest of all beings, so would he also be the most rational of all beings. Because neither his existence nor any of his actions would be the product of sufficient causes external to himself, he would therefore be the uncaused cause of every event he causes to occur; and because it is necessarily true that he would never act contrary to his own (correct) judgment concerning the best course of action, there would be no question of his most important actions being wholly, or even partially, a matter of random chance. So even though such a God would always act from an inner necessity, at least with respect to the most important matters, he would also remain the originating cause of his own actions.
Now suppose, once again, that our human rationality and freedom are reflections, however pale they may be, of God’s own freedom and rationality. The problem, of course, is that we created rational agents, unlike God who never came into being, must somehow come into being ourselves. So if, as I have suggested, God had no choice but to start us out and to permit our embryonic minds to begin operating on their own in a context of ambiguity, ignorance, and a kind of indeterminism that implies random chance—if these are essential conditions of our emergence as free moral agents—then these very same conditions are also obstacles to a fully realized freedom.
And by the way, Jim, when I speak of “a fully realized freedom,” I have in mind a freedom that approximates God’s ideal freedom in this two-fold sense: It exists only when our choices are neither the product of external sufficient causes nor a matter of random chance. And a choice will never be a matter of random chance when, despite being independent of external sufficient causes, it is nonetheless fully determined by a rational judgment concerning the best course of action. In that respect, freedom is also a matter of degree. At the beginning of our lives our actions may reflect a good deal of indeterminism of the kind that implies random chance, which is also an obstacle to a fully realized freedom. But as we begin to learn various lessons, particularly the lessons of love, and our judgments come to reflect God’s own judgments more and more closely, our freedom then becomes more fully realized for the very reason that it comes to resemble God’s ideal freedom more closely.
Stated so briefly, such an account no doubt raises more questions than it answers. So feel free to raise further questions as well as further objections.
Thanks Cindy,
-Tom
Tom,
If they did not know the difference between obeying and not obeying, why were they punished ? Would you punish a morally immature child who did not know what they were doing was wrong? Is your answer to the problem of evil that all pain is inevitable and necessary?
In the Genesis account Adam and Eve certainly knew the difference between obeying a command and disobeying it, even as a typical three year old might know this difference as well. But knowing that is a far cry from having knowledge of good and evil, which the text clearly implies they did not have. Let that pass, however.
More important is your question of whether I would ever punish a morally immature child. My answer: Of course I would and in fact did so more than once when my own children were young and morally immature. For how else could I display my love for them or teach them the difference between right and wrong in the first place. Morally immature children also need to learn at an early age, long before the issue of moral guilt has any relevance at all in their lives, the difference between a command (or a rule), on the one hand, and a mere request, on the other. The very existence of a command, as opposed to a mere request, requires enforcement, typically punishment of some kind in the event of disobedience.
Suppose, by way of illustration, that two year old Suzie should swipe a cookie from four year old Johnny and that Johnny should retaliate by striking his little sister in the face. Would a loving parent merely request of Johnny that he refrain, if he so desires, from any such action in the future? Hardly. Rather than take a chance on Johnny actually injuring his sister, such a parent would likely state firmly but lovingly, “You can’t do that, Johnny. Don’t do that again!” The purpose here would be to establish in Johnny’s mind that he cannot physically strike his sister, regardless of what she does. And if, as morally immature children are wont to do, Johnny should in fact do it again, the parent would likely choose an appropriate punishment—not for the purpose of harming him, but for the purpose of benefiting him. Similarly, as I read the story of Adam and Eve, God punished them not for the purpose of harming them and certainly not for the purpose of restoring his own supposedly “stolen” honor, as St. Anselm put it, but instead for the purpose of benefiting his too loved ones over the long run.
Anyway, however one might interpret the story of Adam and Eve—and I’ll accept just about any interpretation for the sake of a given discussion—I still need an answer to the question that I posed previously. I asked: “Does the condition of a morally immature child, in your opinion, make it impossible for the child to avoid sinning altogether over the course of a normal lifespan? Assuming that a child could avoid sinning (or “missing the mark”) on some given occasion, is a sinless life over a normal lifespan actually feasible?”
Now that I have answered your question, could you perhaps answer mine as well?
Thanks,
-Tom
Tom T, Your definition of “a fully realized freedom” reminds me of 17th-century critics of Leibniz:
I’ve no perfect answer. In my eyes, understanding some aspects of free will is more difficult than understanding the three-in-one paradox of the Trinity.
Interesting point, James. I hadn’t read this, but it makes sense from a certain point of view.
I guess I’d say that I believe God does create the best possible world in that what He creates will continue to increase in goodness until it reaches the level of His own goodness – which of course, it can never do. It is the best possible world. It is a world that never stops getting better.
Okay - I just spent an hour at Barnes and Noble reading Sam Harris’s short book - more a long essay, really - called Free Will. Yes, the same Same Harris that wrote The End of Faith, which was a sort of atheist manifesto.
However, he does have a sharp mind, and Free Will is a challenging, sustained argument in favor of determinism. Not a lot of jargon, just well-presented arguments.
This thread has moved me much further toward the deterministic side of the spectrum; this book reinforces a number of conclusions I’ve come to while reading the forum.
I’d be VERY interested to see what any/all of you think about the book. Around $5 kindle.
I also suppose that God is constantly faced with equally good options for divine response. He would never chose a bad response, but God typically has more that one moral option for response.
Tom,
I don’t believe things like sin, pain, and suffering are necessary per se in the process of our creaturely becoming. I believe all evil is the result of free wills other than God acting in a way that they have chosen themselves. So the choices - and the consequences - really could have been other than they were. The amount of ignorance and ambiguity necessary for our freedom is such that our knowledge doesn’t determine our acts, so I don’t think that ignorance is ever so much that we cannot help but sin. Although we may inevitably make all sorts of mistakes due to ignorance, since sin has to do with a certain intentionality and improper act of the will, unless an act is done deliberately, I don’t think it can qualify as sinful. I can then quite easily imagine a race of free creatures all existing together without having experienced the negative effects of sin. Whether or not such a state is possible to bring about, however, would be something not even an omnipotent God could guarantee.
As for your specific question, I really don’t know. If no particular sin is ever unavoidable, then it seems to me logical to conclude that any set or number of sins are avoidable as well. I do think, however, due to the effects of our fallen nature, the opportunity to sin and the sheer amount of temptations that are constantly bombarding us are not reflective of an “ideal” process of creaturely becoming. In other words, experiencing all the pain and suffering that the human race has (as well as the animal kingdom) is not, I do not believe, metaphysically necessary for us (do I need to cheat on my wife in order to have the best possible relationship?), but only relatively, considering the moral state and choices of the grand total of free agents who’ve had and still have an impact on the universe.