It seems to me you are lost in technical language but either way we go as you explained it,we see the word choose at the end and so it seems to me that no matter how we go about believing we still choose to believe in something or reject it and pay the consequences for the choice we made,regardless of how we came about choosing which course of action was the correct choice for us to make.Jac3510 wrote:I doubt we'd reach an agreement, actually. The "heart" doesn't enter into it, at least, not as you are using the term. Emotions are arational. They are not irrational, as some hold. They are arational. They are "passions" in the classical sense of the word. That is, they are psychosomatic responses to some (intellectual) judgment. They are, in this, distinct from "feelings" generally. "Feelings" are somatic only. Sleepiness and pain are feelings, not emotions. They are purely bodily. Love and revulsion are emotions, because while they (necessarily) are somatic, just as feelings are, they are set off by a psychological component. I love this or am repulsed by that because of what I judge to be true about it. I fear a dog attacking me because I believe that such will put me in danger. My body then produces a physiological response to that belief: fear. That fear motivates me to make a choice--that is, it encourages my will to choose a course of action. My intellect has judged (I believe--I don't choose to believe) that running from the dog is the best course of action. My fear motivates me (powerfully) to accept that course of action. I then choose to so act in accordance with that judgment.
Nothing Rick has said, and no examples he has provided, suggest anything other than the above is true. It is, bluntly, just false to claim that we choose to believe anything. It is, again, a confusion of the functions of the intellect and the will. I cannot say this enough: the intellect does not choose, and the will does not judge. Rather, the intellect judges and the will chooses. To say we choose to believe is to make choosing a property of the intellect, which is just a confusion, as you say, of the properties of what it means to be a person.
But from a biblical standpoint it really seems like you are denying we have free-will to choose to believe in God or to not believe in God.Are you saying that we can't choose to believe in Jesus because we were already programmed to believe in God or to not believe in God like robots?
