Re: Where is the free in freewill?
Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2016 7:09 pm
Strictly, your will doesn't choose A rather than B. That's a circular statement. Rather, your intellect makes a judgment that A is preferable to B, and your will is your capacity to actualize that preference.Audacity wrote:Wouldn't a choice be the result of exercising the free will, rather than being identical with it?Storyteller wrote:Because we choose.Audacity wrote:Yes. In short: How is it the will does this rather than that?...Storyteller wrote:Audacity, please bear with me.
I can be slow on the uptake sometimes, but more fool you if you dismiss me for that butwhat, exactly, are you asking? How what? Free will works?
Because we reason, rightly or wrongly, but we can choose.
That choice is free will.
In any case, how is it your will came to "choose" A rather than B?
Let me try and help you see why your question is so stupid from a Christian perspective. We keep telling you that you are cutting down straw men. I want to try to demonstrate that for you (actually, for the benefit of the rest of the board, because I suspect you are an intractable troll incapable of processing what is being said to you, but even trolls have a use, and that use is to provide rational people with material by which to refine their own thoughts and ideas):
Consider the saints in heaven--or, for that matter, the angels confirmed in grace. These beings are impeccable, which means that they cannot do evil. They are incapable of sin. They can only do what is good and right. Now, many people assume, then, that such beings have lost their free will. After all, if you can't choose to do evil, then you don't have free will! If God somehow coerces you to do good, then you've made no choice (and some press that point further by saying that therefore the choice to do good, being no choice at all, renders the good done of no moral significance, and thus the saints in heaven are less saintly than the fallen believers of earth!). But such an argument only holds on your modernistic understanding of free will. In fact, understood correctly, the glorified saints are freer than any of us. The reason goes back to what I said before. Free will is not about the ability to choose good or bad, this or that. Free will nothing more or less than the natural capacity of the person to elect this good rather than that. Now, for you and me, our ability to elect this good rather than that is highly constrained. That's why Christians speak of The Fall. We deny that humans in this life are truly free, because we are in bondage to sin. What happens, in practice, is that we either are unable to see the good in something or else we think we see good in something that is not good. Moreover, because of our selfish natures, the good we seek is usually directed not to love (in the proper sense of the word) but rather only to self-"fulfillment." For reasons I won't go into here, that itself is sufficient to prevent us from actually electing a good at all, which is one of the reasons we are so inclined to sin.
But none of that applies to the glorified saints. Not only are they freed from the bondage of sin and thus tendency toward the self, but their intellects are purified so that they can see what is actually good, and they take part in what is called the Beatific Vision. Now the BV is nothing less than the Vision of God. They see Him. Now, God is Good. I'm not making a moral claim about Him. I am saying something about His essence. For reasons I don't have the time to explain here, Good and Being are interchangeable terms (so something is good to the extent it exists and to the extent it does not exist, that it suffers privation of being, it is evil). Moreover, He is Perfect Good because He is Absolute Being. The old, technical word is actus purus (Pure Actuality). God alone has this attribute. He is absolutely and necessarily good. All else is, necessarily, contingently and finitely good. Thus, when the glorified saints see God, they see Perfect Good. They cannot but will themselves to God.
And this is where you fail to understand what free will is. There is no coercion here. The will necessarily elects the good, and since God is the highest good, then the will--when it perceives God--necessarily wills itself toward God. And in willing the Absolute Good, it thereby wills that which closest to that absolute good.
Now, in all of this, I'm being a bit anthropomorphic. I speak of the will as if it is a person--as if the will were choosing. But that's not the case at all. It is the PERSON who chooses, and he does so by making use of many of his faculties. The senses perceive some good. The intellect makes a judgment as to a good. In abstraction, the intellect compares this good to that. Again, in this life, all goods are contingent, and thus no particular good is willed necessarily. But some goods are far more likely to be willed than others. If I offered you a million dollars or a sandwich, which would you choose? I probably know which that would be: the greater good. That's just how the intellect works, and the act of electing one to the other just is the act of the will.
That's why I said before: the will is the natural capacity of a person to elect this good rather than that. It is not the choice itself. The choice is the result of the will. The will is a capacity--natural in the sense that the capacity is rooted in what we are (rational beings). Understood this way, it's just absurd to suggest that there can be no determinative factor in free will. The will is the determinative factor! By nature, it determines this rather than that good. But the will, by nature, necessarily MUST will a good. The problem is that the will cannot perceive any good. That is the faculty of the intellect. So the intellect submits to the will what it has perceived--which requires interpretation of what it has perceived. And the person, in choosing what he has perceived here rather than what he perceives there, activates the will. All of this is true even where there is only one choice. If I say, "Pick a number between one and three, but the number can't be one or three," then your choice of "two" is still your choice. And you willed it freely. You perceived the good of two, and you willed that. You were not determined to will "two." Your will is fitted to an infinite number of goods--not two exclusively. And therefore, the willing of two is the determining of what was previous indeterminate. That's why we call the will "free." It is "free" in the sense that it is naturally fitted to any number of goods.
By the way, the intellect is "free" in this same sense. Our intellect is fitted to an infinite number of ideas. It is not determined to this or that idea.
And all of this is why that the saints in heaven, the confirmed angels, Jesus, and ultimately God Himself, are all much freer than any of us, even though they all (including God) necessarily will God and cannot fail to do so!
[Note: again, this was written for the rest of the community more than to Audacity. He cut bait and ran a long time ago. So I hope that you all find this somewhat helpful! My interest in Audacity, besides being a teaching tool, is limited to my office pool of how much longer before he's banned . . .
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