What does “Free Will” mean?

childeye 2 said:

A few questions for you: If freewill is freedom to choose to do something against God's will, then what's the difference between free will and sin?

And what about the carnal will as opposed to the spiritual will described in scripture? Is not the carnal mind pre-disposed to choose according to the carnal desire?

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While we have the ability to choose to act against God's will, we also have the ability to choose to do God's will, so it is sin is only when we use our free will to choose to act against God's will. However, our carnal nature or character traits influence our ability to make decisions, so we need to choose to deny ourselves and put on the new man so that we instead live in accordance with the divine nature and express the character traits of God.

Soyeong said:

While we have the ability to choose to act against God's will, we also have the ability to choose to do God's will, so it is sin is only when we use our free will to choose to act against God's will.

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Have you considered that every act of sin is preceded by believing a lie that appeals to the carnal nature of our vanity? This would suggest that sin is not an ability, but a disability in mankind based on deception according to the weakness of the flesh. Romans 7:11, for sin taking occasion of the commandment, deceived me, and by it slew me.

you are not controlled.

Radagast said:

Assuming that you believe in God's foreknowledge, then there is in heaven, so to speak, a videotape showing everything you are going to do in the future.

Your actions are fixed in the sense that they must happen as foreseen.

This means that the free will that you have must be compatibilist free will, not libertarian free will.

Of course, you can still believe in libertarian free will if you are an Open Theist and deny God's foreknowledge (as traditionally defined). But then you'd be so far outside of traditional Christian orthodoxy that there would be no point in communicating.

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Well, I do not ascribe to your false understanding here. I am not an Open Theist and yet Compatiblism is false because it is a part of the illogical claims of Calvinism.

Compatibilism is an attempt to reconcile polar opposites, Determinism & Free Will, in a way where both can “coexist” together, without the one completely eliminating the other. In other words, if God “ordained whatsoever comes to pass” (Determinism) via a predetermined Script, penned before the foundation of the world, whereby all events in history unfold according to this alleged Script, how can there be any sense of Free Will? Wouldn’t it merely be an illusion of Determinism?

Question: If God causes the intentions of the heart (from the womb to the tomb), then what happens to the purported basis for judgment?

Answer: God would be judging His own sin that He decreed to cause.

Most Calvinists deem “foreknowledge” to be “predetermined counsel,” which Arminians object is merely an attempt to read foreordination into foreknowledge:

What the Calvinists have done is to turn an attribute of God, "foreknowledge," into an act of God, "foreordination."


Source used:
Refuting Calvinism

childeye 2 said:

Respectfully, I don't know exactly what you mean by denying free will entirely. The term free certainly can exist in degrees, but still you did not qualify any meaning by describing what it is partially free from or isn't entirely free from.

As far as judgment is concerned, I believe that you're not taking vanity into account. Suppose God made mankind out of dirt, but yet good according to the breath of God that made man in His image. Now what if mankind began to lose sight of the fact that he was made from the dirt and he began to think he was good according to his own prerogative? He gradually became vain and unthankful for the Spirit. Now suppose God wanted to prove that He is the goodness in mankind and that we are not wise or benevolent of our own free choice. Should God be blamed if He gave mankind over to the flesh and allowed us to become fools and abominations, even because we counted the goodness in us as our own prerogative taking His precious Spirit for granted?

And in accordance with that scenario, if we came to understand that we had become corrupt not because we freely chose to be, but because we had lost our light through vanity, then would we not then be obliged to forgive others who sin against us even because we know it is not by their "free will" that they had succumbed to the lusts of the flesh? The fall of Satan was brought about through vanity, and the first sin by Adam and Eve was for the sake of vanity. Cain was jealous of Abel because of vanity.

If you contemplate and understand what I am alluding to, then you also should understand why I do not believe free will is necessary for judgment to occur, but rather I believe God will judge me according to what measure I judge others.

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You are speaking in foggy terms and you are not speaking clearly. Let me make this real simple for you. Does God make some to be saved and others to not be saved against their own free will choice? Is God ultimate responsible for who is saved and who is not saved?

If you say "yes" to these questions, then you are basically taking away any responsibility on our part involving a judgment. We cannot be judged if God was the one who forced us to have no other choice but to be there. This is why Calvinism and denying free will is dumb.

Does God want people to sin? No.
While God can predict future events of man committing sin, that does not mean it is God's desire for man to sin.
God's foreknowledge is not foreordination.
God does not make or influence sinful actions as a part of His sovereign will to take place.
God is merely predicts the future of free willed beings perfectly.
This does not mean God approves of man's sin which is done by his free will choice.

childeye 2 said:

Respectfully Elohim is a plural. What you are saying is God cannot sin, lie, cheat, etc..

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What I'm saying is he has free will.

Radagast said:

No, it's an obvious truth. You can't "change the future" to be different from what God foresees.
If God foresees the future, then the future is fixed.
The fact that our actions are fixed does not mean that we are not responsible for them.
Now you are denying God's foreknowledge as traditionally defined; you are an Open Theist.
This is a logically consistent position, but not imho a biblical one.

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God was going to destroy the City of Nineveh but changed His mind after the people of the city repented. Obviously the future was not fixed.

If the future is fixed and cannot be changed, why bother praying for someone’s recovery? According to you the prayers don’t do any good since the future is fixed.

Archivist said:

God was going to destroy the City of Nineveh but changed His mind after the people of the city repented. Obviously the future was not fixed.

If the future is fixed and cannot be changed, why bother praying for someone’s recovery? According to you the prayers don’t do any good since the future is fixed.

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I agree.

Archivist said:

Obviously the future was not fixed.

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You are an Open Theist, I assume, since you were virtually quoting Boyd.

Archivist said:

According to you the prayers don’t do any good since the future is fixed.

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I didn't say that.

Jason0047 said:

Well, I do not ascribe to your false understanding here. I am not an Open Theist and yet Compatiblism is false because it is a part of the illogical claims of Calvinism.

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Your condemnation of Calvinism has been broad enough to also rule out the Catholic options, so the only other possible third option seems to be some form of Boethianism, and I don't think that really works.

And you clearly don't hold to Boethianism either, so I'm at a loss to know what your position actually is. From your other posts, it does sound like Open Theism, though.

Radagast said:

You are an Open Theist, I assume, since you were virtually quoting Boyd.

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Didn’t realize I was quoting Boyd. I was simply stating what scripture tells us.

I didn't say that.

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Then please explain. If the future is fixed, why pray?

childeye 2 said:

I would like to respectfully point out, that any true and sincere worship would have to be drawn out by the object of worship, and would therefore not be voluntary as in according to one's own prerogative. If a person had a free will defined as able to choose to Love God or not, then they do not know Him.

Therefore if you're meaning to say that we are all here to learn Who God is and why He is trustworthy, I would agree. But such ignorance or blindness would not constitute a free will to choose. Since it's not credible that God can be both trustworthy and not trustworthy, such a free will would only exist in a place of equivocation.

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I respectfully say this... we all as believers in the Lord Jesus Christ must apply Proverbs 3:5-7... Lean not unto thy own understanding but in all they ways acknowledge him and he will direct your paths. Intellectualism is human reasoning which often can become an enemy of God. Rather we are called to ask the holy spirit who is knowledge, wisdom and discernment.

bling said:

As a spinoff from my last thread I found lots of differing ideas with “free will” and a need to ask some more questions:

Does God have both the power and knowledge to create a being with the ability to make one truly autonomous free will choice and if not why not?

Would God’s foreknowledge and/or knowing everything keep a being from making a truly autonomous free will choice?

Would giving a being the ability to make a truly autonomous free will choice reduce or even eliminate God’s Sovereignty?

God can certainly keep any being from making a choice, so does allowing the being to make the choice mean God is not “controlling” or “over” the universe?

With enough environmental and biological information, it can be determent which ice-cream you will chose, so is that really a free will choice?

If God created a being with the very limited autonomous free will ability to make just one choice, yet that being never came close to reaching the age to ever making that autonomous free will choice, would God still know the exact without a doubt selection the being would have made had if it lived long enough?

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We all look at Eden as a perfect place. A place made for perfect Adam and Eve. However in Eden was the Serpent that God also made. The Serpent was made more "cunning" , having the skill to deceive more than any beast of the field. Now we can take this as a complete preconceived set up by God in order to deceive man into sin or we can simply accept that a test was provided in order to check obedience.
This is where it all starts and your answer to this question is how you define GOD.

YanKee Gal said:

I respectfully say this... we all as believers in the Lord Jesus Christ must apply Proverbs 3:5-7... Lean not unto thy own understanding but in all they ways acknowledge him and he will direct your paths. Intellectualism is human reasoning which often can become an enemy of God. Rather we are called to ask the holy spirit who is knowledge, wisdom and discernment.

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Thank you for your post. After reading what you have said, my response to you is that everything I said in my prior post I do not believe came through my own understanding, but through the Holy Spirit. Are you contesting that what I have said about the meaning of free will is untrue?

messianist said:

What I'm saying is he has free will.

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So you're saying a person who has a free will cannot sin or lie or cheat, since God cannot sin lie or cheat. Because some believers in free will here, are saying we have a free will because we can sin lie and cheat.

Radagast said:

Your condemnation of Calvinism has been broad enough to also rule out the Catholic options, so the only other possible third option seems to be some form of Boethianism, and I don't think that really works.

And you clearly don't hold to Boethianism either, so I'm at a loss to know what your position actually is. From your other posts, it does sound like Open Theism, though.

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No. Again, I am not an Open Theist. Open Theism proposes that God does not know every detail of the future. I don't believe that. You propose that God's "foreknowledge" (i.e. future knowledge of God) is actually God's "foreordination" (i.e. all future events are an act of God). For example: Compatiblism is saying that when people sin in the future, and God predicts that, it was God's will that they sinned because it is the future that He predicts or desires. But it is never God's will that anyone sins so you are faced with an internal problem involving Compatiblism unless of course you think God does not have a problem in making people to sin (Which runs contrary to the goodness of God that we know from the Bible and our walk with God).

There is no problem as you suggest.

God knowing what we are going to do does not negate that we have free will to do the right thing that God desires from us. God interacts with us in real time and He considers alternate possibilities. We see this with the Ninevites. God was going to really destroy them. The wrath of judgment was coming upon the city of Nineveh. But they averted judgment because they repented and forsaked their evil ways. If Compatiblism was true, God would just want them to sin or to be saved from the very beginning and there would have been no possibility to change. This is where your theology fails. So good luck trying to reconcile clear Scripture with your flawed belief.

God knowing the future does not equate with God desiring that future to be for man. God's will is that He never desires for anyone to sin or do evil. If you honestly believe God's will is for some people to sin, then you would be attacking the very good character of God in that He is holy, good, righteous, and loving.

You equate God perfectly knowing the future with Determinism. That the future God sees must happen and He will do everything in His power to make that future to happen. But God's will is that people should never sin. So while God does know the future perfectly, it is never His will that you sin as a part of that future even though He knows that people will sin or do evil in the future.

childeye 2 said:

So you're saying a person who has a free will cannot sin or lie or cheat, since God cannot sin lie or cheat. Because some believers in free will here, are saying we have a free will because we can sin lie and cheat.

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I'm saying its Elohim that has free will

bling said:

What does “Free Will” mean

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In the title of the OP "Free Will" is in title case which grammatically points to a proper noun like a title or name of something (hence the title case). This is inconsistent with the rest of the case structure of the title of the OP and because it is enclosed in quotation marks we can be sure it is specific to these words.

This is suggestive that Free Will doesn't equal free will like Orthodox ≠ orthodox or Red Socks ≠ red socks. So what is Free Will? Well, it could be anything like the title of a dissertation or the name of a dog. No one really knows until it's subject matter is identified.

This doesn't stop here, with the added quotation marks it suggests it is a quotation from a source that carries either a non-traditional or controversial application or unknown meaning of the subject at hand. Remember, the subject at hand is the aforementioned proper noun "Free Will" which is still unidentified.

So charged with this information "Free Will" is a non-traditional, controversial or otherwise unknown application of the unidentified proper noun Free Will quoted from an unidentified source.

Radagast said:

Your condemnation of Calvinism has been broad enough to also rule out the Catholic options, so the only other possible third option seems to be some form of Boethianism, and I don't think that really works.

And you clearly don't hold to Boethianism either, so I'm at a loss to know what your position actually is. From your other posts, it does sound like Open Theism, though.

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Do you believe it is God's will for some people to sin?

Yes, or no?

Please understand that God allowing people to sin is not the same as God's perfect will for people to sin.

This is the heart of the problem of your belief in Compatiblism.