Indeed. Of course God uses secondary means. In fact, the laws of physics are perhaps the GOAT secondary means. Gravity, not angels, keeps the orbits stable. However Calvinism requires a supernatural intervention to change someone’s desires so that they then choose God, because prior to that another Calvinistic doctrine, total depravity, states that fallen man left to his own devices will never choose God for, again according to Calvinism, he has a moral inability to do so.
In the Aristotelian framework, final causes are not efficient causes. They do not cause the agent to make the choice that it does, and in fact they do not cause anything in the sense that we usually use the word “cause” (which is efficient causation). Rather, they are the goals or purposes towards which the agent is directed.
Do your intentions cause you to make certain choices? Or do rather you choose to act on certain intentions over others? I think it is the latter.
I’m using substance in the sense it usually has within philosophy. Prototypical examples of substances in this sense are individual human beings or animals; an individuated entity that stands as the bearer of properties (and not itself a property borne by something else), though there’s room in the concept to include mass-like terms as well (i.e. some amount a chemical substance). Basically, substances are the bearers of properties and are the entities that populate reality.
Good, I’m glad you are on board with me regarding the laws of physics. If they aren’t causing things to happen, then its the physical things in reality that are causing things to happen. But this looks spontaneous to me: e.g. electrons continuously cause the electric field around them to take on a certain form and the electric field continuously exerts forces on electrons; there isn’t another physical thing causing electrons and electric fields to act in this way. They simply do it by nature. (Pretending that classical electrostatics is the true physics, for the sake of illustration.) In the same way, free will agents can make free choices in accordance with their nature.
That is not my view. Substances are causes, events are not. The agent, a substance, is the cause of the choice, which is an event. The event forms an occasion on which the agent or some other substance may go on to cause further things. E.g. the agent decides to move his arm (cause = agent, effect = arm moves), which pushes on a stick (cause = arm, effect = stick moves), the stick transfers that force to a stone (cause = stick, effect = stone moves).
You seem to be embracing some kind of causal principle. It might help if you were to lay out clearly what exactly it is. For example, a classical Aristotelian causal principle is “everything that undergoes change is caused to do so by something else”. (I happen to disagree with that one, but it is the most common example.) I’m just not sure, exactly, what you find incoherent about my concept of free will.
I believe the principle of sufficient reason is a fundamental metaphysical truth, something along the lines of “every contingent truth has an explanation”. Libertarian free will as I’ve laid it out accords with this PSR, so I see no problem with it.
But on what basis do I choose? How do my intentions arise?
This seems an archaic, artificial, and arbitrary distinction that bears no resemblance to actual existence. I’m sure it has this meaning in the sort of philosophy that doesn’t look past the fall of Rome, but does it have any relevance today?
Sure. But they cause things to happen in ways that the laws of physics describe. And there are in each case chains of causation that extend back in time as far as we can look. No, it’s not spontaneous.
That’s not the same way at all. Choice is not a property. And you’re just defining free will into existence by using the term “free choice”. What’s free about it?
This distinction between substances and events is artificial. And even so, in your own example of electrons, don’t electric fields, which are not substances, cause events? Arms are substances? But it’s the force exerted by the arm, not the arm itself, that causes movement of the stick.
I see no relevance of Aristotles philosophy here. We see from the world that events have causes, which are other events. Your brain causes your arm to move which causes the stick to move which causes the stone to move. But that’s an incomplete description, because the causal chain can be extended in both temporal directions. Some events are entirely spontaneous, i.e. the decay of an unstable nucleus. Neither seems to contribute to free will, and I see nothing else. You certainly haven’t articulated anything else.
Not that I can see.
my point was that predestination takes out the variable of free-will (or negates it), and is more of a mathematical philosophy that assumes that there is no choice, all is directed by one (who directs the laws) which is consistent with physics.
Your understanding of predestination is not accurate. Predestination, in Christian theology, is the doctrine that all events have been willed by God, usually with reference to the eventual fate of the individual soul. Explanations of predestination often seek to address the “paradox of free will”, whereby God’s omniscience seems incompatible with human free will.
In my view, Hebbian learning amounts to adjusting (or calibrating) how we categorize.
I say you choose on the basis of your intentions. Your intentions certainly play in role in explaining your choice; you choose for reasons. But they don’t cause your choice. You aren’t forced to do something whenever you have the corresponding intention.
All I’m arguing for here is that this idea is coherent. You’re telling me this is incoherent - inconsistent, contradictory. I don’t see it. Perhaps it doesn’t fit with some causal principle that you are assuming, but since you didn’t take up my suggestion to formulate one, I don’t know.
A universe containing entities that have properties bears no resemblance to actual existence?
The fact that physical entities cause things to happen in a describable way is irrelevant, seeing as you agree with me that the laws of physics are not themselves things exerting a causal influence on the physical entities. My point is that electrons create electric fields and electric fields push electrons around on their own, in the sense that there is nothing else around causing them to behave in that way. The electrons cause changes in the electric field and the electric field changes the motion of the electrons - but there isn’t a further physical entity causing the electrons and electric field to causally affect each other in those ways. They just do it.
So the causal activity of the electrons and the electric field isn’t explained by a further cause. (At least, not in the same sense; let’s not bring up divine concurrence and conservation in the present conversation…) Nevertheless, their causal activity is explicable: it is what they do by nature. (I.e. their “formal cause” in Aristotelian terms.)
This parallels the case of free will: when an agent makes a free decision, it is a basic causal activity and it isn’t explained by a further cause. Nevertheless, it is still explicable: the agent acted for reasons, and was able to do so because of their nature. (Bringing both final and formal causality into it.)
I’m afraid I don’t understand your objection at this point. It is free because it is caused by the agent (in accord with the agent’s intentions), and not by something other than the agent.
Hardly. Events are ontologically dependent on substances: they are the state of affairs of some substance having a property or changing in having a property.
In the toy example I gave, the electric field is a substance. It is a bearer of properties (field values at each point in spacetime) and one of the constituents of the universe.
And I disagree that it is “the force exerted by the arm, and not the arm itself, that causes the movement of the stick.” It is the arm that moves the stick. The force exerted by the arm isn’t a genuine entity; it is an abstraction that we use in physics to talk about the causal powers of things.
(Strictly speaking an arm is not a substance; it would only be part of a complete substance, the human body. But that is an irrelevant digression.)
Maybe, that’s always possible. The word predestination appears in the bible, so everyone has to deal with it in some manner. Non-Calvinists including Catholics sometimes view it generally, as you indicated (1), while for Calvinists what you describe is usually called the doctrine of the sovereignty of God. Calvinists (at least those I’ve been around and read for 30 years) use predestination and (unconditional) election as synonyms, and it refers to God the father choosing a people before the foundation of the world, Christ redeeming them, and the Spirit sanctifying them. A Google search on “reformed Doctrine of predestination” will confirm this. By the way the very word pre-destination suggests that it is one’s destination that is determined in advance.
(1) Some non-Calvinists also use predestination narrowly, applying the word only to salvation, but interpret its meaning that God could look ahead in time and see who would respond to the gospel.
I do not think that David and myself see predestination in the same way, but his theology may be accurate and my view, and yours, may be wrong. There is a wide range of perspectives within the limits of Christian orthodoxy here.
Unless the Agent has an innate ability to make choices.
In which case, he or she has reasons why they made a choice… But the reason for a particular choice is itself not the cause of said choice.
I am in bible college, so I am giving you the current generally accepted understanding among professors and students…the opinions on it vary, but the definition of what it is doesn’t.
In other words, the agent has free will. But what is free will? And we’re back to the beginning again.
Peace can. Cf the global peace index.
Funny, I meant internal peace, not lack of civil unrest…kudos to the humor.
That’s why i mentioned that freewill cannot exist in a materialist context.
It has to be the basic property of something that is immaterial (or atleast cannot be broken down in to material interactions).
Its obvious from human experience that Freewill exists. And so, its a problem for materialism.
Introducing immaterial “somethings” doesn’t help. It just means, apparently, that we’re not supposed to think about it any more, just accept that it’s true. Same with “basic property” and “can’t be broken down in to material interactions”. It’s all a mystery that you just have to accept.
Is it, now? But there are plenty of obvious things that aren’t true.
This mystery will still exist even of all that exists is matter or “nature”.
Not if there’s no such thing as free will.