Drew
Member
Hello Dave:
I read the article you posted and found it to be a little hard to follow. The parts that I thought that I understood were unconvincing – there are a lot of hidden assumptions. I won’t go into more detail in this post.
I hold it to be a self-evident truth that the notion of punishment is only sensible where there is “freedom to act morallyâ€Â. And an eternity in the torment of hell certainly sounds like punishment to me. Now in another thread, you wrote the following: “God does not elect the unregenerate to damnation. He passes them by, leaving them in their unregenerate state, and thus allows them to suffer the destiny that they earned..." Let’s analyze what the concept “earned†really means – after all it must mean something, you presumably did not frivolously add the phrase “that they earnedâ€Â.
I just cannot make sense of the notion of earning punishment if I, as an agent that can act in the world, and as a possible recipient of punishment, do not have the freedom to choose to act righteously. And if I understand you correctly, you hold that we are all born with a nature that prohibits our acting righteously. Being born a certain way is not any kind of choice and there is no legitimate grounds for imputing guilt to someone who is “born to sin†than there is grounds to blame someone for being born with nine toes.
It seems to me that Calvinists often deploy the following kind of argument: We deserve our punishment because we indeed act freely in the sense that it is only our desires, not our specific actions, that are “pre-determined†by our sinful nature. Such a Calvinist is trying to appease the deeply held human intuition that punishment is only deserved if there is freedom to choose to act one way as opposed to another. Fair enough. But then the Calvinist maintains that our desires, our inclinations, are “born into us†and that such desires cannot be overcome by any act of the will (i.e. our wills are enslaved).
But such a Calvinist wants it both ways: he wants to claim our punishment is earned by granting that our actions are free but he also then applies the restriction that our desires and inclinations are necessarily evil. Well, this is like trying to argue that I deserve punishment for eating Mother’s apple pie off the window ledge simply because I had the “freedom†to do something else. However, if that “something ele†cannot be anything except another evil act, the whole claim that I have freedom to act otherwise is effectively turned into a sham.
I read the article you posted and found it to be a little hard to follow. The parts that I thought that I understood were unconvincing – there are a lot of hidden assumptions. I won’t go into more detail in this post.
I hold it to be a self-evident truth that the notion of punishment is only sensible where there is “freedom to act morallyâ€Â. And an eternity in the torment of hell certainly sounds like punishment to me. Now in another thread, you wrote the following: “God does not elect the unregenerate to damnation. He passes them by, leaving them in their unregenerate state, and thus allows them to suffer the destiny that they earned..." Let’s analyze what the concept “earned†really means – after all it must mean something, you presumably did not frivolously add the phrase “that they earnedâ€Â.
I just cannot make sense of the notion of earning punishment if I, as an agent that can act in the world, and as a possible recipient of punishment, do not have the freedom to choose to act righteously. And if I understand you correctly, you hold that we are all born with a nature that prohibits our acting righteously. Being born a certain way is not any kind of choice and there is no legitimate grounds for imputing guilt to someone who is “born to sin†than there is grounds to blame someone for being born with nine toes.
It seems to me that Calvinists often deploy the following kind of argument: We deserve our punishment because we indeed act freely in the sense that it is only our desires, not our specific actions, that are “pre-determined†by our sinful nature. Such a Calvinist is trying to appease the deeply held human intuition that punishment is only deserved if there is freedom to choose to act one way as opposed to another. Fair enough. But then the Calvinist maintains that our desires, our inclinations, are “born into us†and that such desires cannot be overcome by any act of the will (i.e. our wills are enslaved).
But such a Calvinist wants it both ways: he wants to claim our punishment is earned by granting that our actions are free but he also then applies the restriction that our desires and inclinations are necessarily evil. Well, this is like trying to argue that I deserve punishment for eating Mother’s apple pie off the window ledge simply because I had the “freedom†to do something else. However, if that “something ele†cannot be anything except another evil act, the whole claim that I have freedom to act otherwise is effectively turned into a sham.