Free Will

About 12 years ago I engaged in some lengthy dialogue with a fellow graduate student who had abandoned his Christian faith upon reading Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion. Below is one of the emails I sent to “Oleg” (not his real name).

Dear “Oleg”

Please allow me to begin by first expressing my profoundest sorrow over the terrible experiences you have been through. I cannot possibly understand the hurt and anguish these things have caused you. I can only say how sorry I am that this has happened to you and that I hope that in spite of it all, you are able to clearly distinguish between the wickedness of the persons that took advantage of you and the goodness of the God they so poorly represented in your case. My heart truly ached within me when I read your email. I know these words of mine may not mean that much, and certainly they can’t erase your personal history or the present feelings that history may yet arouse within you, but please know that I truly and deeply hurt for you because of this. 

I also want to apologize for taking so long to send a response to your last two emails. Despite the passage of so much time, I still, regrettably, have no elaborate treatise to offer you in defense of my position. I have no knock-down argument to give to you. And truthfully, my suspicion is that given the rather lofty standard of evidence you have raised for justifiable belief in God (namely, a theophany), there is not much I can say that you will likely find especially compelling. Nevertheless, I will try. 

Strong Calvinists assert that, because mankind is dead in trespasses and sins, that he cannot respond to the gospel in faith. Therefore, the sinner must be regenerated, through irresistible grace on the unwilling, before he can ever believe the gospel. This assertion amounts to the claim that we must be born again that we might believe, but it falls on both logical and biblical grounds.

First, this Strong Calvinist view effectively denies the omnibenevolence of God by claiming that God arbitrarily regenerates some while denying others. If God is all-good, why is He not good to all? Second, irresistible grace on the unwilling is no different from Divine rape, a deplorable view of God’s love. Third, not one verse of Scripture teaches that we must be regenerated prior to exercising faith. The view is simply the result of extreme and faulty anthropological and theistic presuppositions. Rather, Scripture teaches over and again that we must believe in order to be saved (e.g., Mk. 16:16; Jn. 1:12, 3:16, 20:31; Acts 16:31; Rom. 5:1, 10:9-10; Gal. 3:22). Though Scripture consistently teaches that man is sinful and estranged from God, it never intimates that man is therefore incapable of responding to an offer of salvation. It is God’s goodness that draws us to Him (Jn. 6:44; Rom. 2:4), but it is also God’s goodness that prevents Him from raping our souls with irresistible grace and forcing us, against our will, to believe in Him.

Ironically, if regeneration is truly prior to faith as Strong Calvinists claim, then the very principle of the Reformation, sola fide, is undermined. For if regeneration is prior to faith, then in reality there are no conditions for salvation. To be consistent, therefore, the Strong Calvinist must admit that faith is not a condition for salvation, but merely an evidence of it. 

Man’s free will is either determined by another, indetermined, or determined by self. These three options are logically exhaustive. 

Determinism, in both its naturalistic and supernaturalistic forms, is self-defeating. If complete determinism is true, then all who hold to non-deterministic views are determined to do so, and can not be expected to change their views. Further, humans could not be held responsible for their actions if those actions were not the result of their own self-determined free choice. 

Indeterminism, on the other hand, makes for an irrational world by its rejection of the principle of causality. And like determinism, indeterminism illegitimately releases man from his moral responsibility, since his moral actions are ultimately uncaused. 

Self-determinism is the only option left and the correct one. First, to answer a common charge, it should be noted that self-determinism is not the same as self-causation. The latter would indeed be a logical impossibility because a being cannot be the cause of its own being. But there is no contradiction in an action being self-caused. Self-determinism alone explains the moral responsibility that man has before God. While God is the cause of the fact of free will, man is responsible for the acts of free will. This is also true of Lucifer. If Lucifer’s fall was determined by another, then God would be responsible for sin and evil. If Lucifer’s fall was indetermined, then God, a Being of perfect rationality, created an irrational world, which is absurd. The correct view is that Lucifer’s fall was the result of his own free will decision to choose the finite good (himself) over and against the Infinite Good (God). God gave to angels and humans the good of self-deterministic free will. As free moral creatures, angels and humans are responsible for what is done with that free will.