Sunday, September 13, 2009

A Critical Review of Gordon H. Clark's "God And Evil: The Problem Solved": Part IX

The current section of Clark's work that I am journalling through is called "Appeal to Ignorance". He is responding to Free Will theorists who claim that Free Will makes the most sense out of their conscious experiences ("it just seems like I have free will and that my actions are not being predetermined").

Clark explains that it is ridiculous to think that you would be able to know whether your actions and intentions are being determined or not. In fact, it would require omniscience!

I pretty much agree with Clark in this section. Western science allows us to understand certain influences on our wills such as diet, exercise, social conditions, and weather. But it has no power to investigate metaphysical, unpredicatable, divine causation. So when we get cranky with our spouses and feel like our behavior is entirely our own, scientific data enables our minds to know better. But if our every action and intention is being supernaturally and unpredicatably determined, we would have no way of knowing better. If Calvinistic determinism is true of us, we might still feel "free".

However, under Calvinism, any misinterpretation of our "free" feelings would be due to God's causation. And while Calvinists claim that the fact that we have conscious wills grounds our responsibility for things like misunderstanding the world, it still seems strange and unbiblical that God would deceive us (even despite verses they use as prooftexts of their position that God deludes humans according to His good pleasure).

1 comment:

  1. i commission thee to write a blog on fathering thus far. plz.

    ReplyDelete

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