Llyricist

Do you even know what a logical contradiction IS???
No, by YOUR definition of Omnibenevolence and YOUR assertion that love is good, He. Can. Not. Not. Love. Else. He. Would. Not. Be. Omnibenevolent.
Are you asserting that God simply chooses to be Omnibenevolent? That at any moment he COULD choose to be evil? (actually that is perfectly in line with the OT Jehovah, but we don't seem to be arguing that) But it negates the idea that Omnibenevolence is in any way a part of the definition of God.
The same definition it HAS with the total absence of it.
That our choices are arrived at without coersion of any kind. Try to prove that.
I challenged the Love is good assertion because I seriously question its legitimacy, for the reason I stated. Love Does Cause Pain.
No, it asks how Christian apologists came to the presupposition of free will.
Yes you Are!! Straight into the realm of self-contradiction! Hardly
You said this in response to my contention that you cannot know that "Nothing without free will is capable of love."
Which has nothing to do with the existence of God. It is a separate issue.

You are truly a master of non-sequiter.:notworthy
Okay, you have no sense of humor, you win. you obviously responded to this before reading my entire post, where I did state my actual objection to this.
Prove that they ACTUALLY CHOSE to stop loving them, and not that they chose to stop acting in a loving manner, or that the feeling didn't dissappear without any conscious decision. I have alot of experience with both, and in my experience, to love or not to love is NEVER a choice.
Now you are defining free will as being the same as plain old will (without the free). I have no problem conflating consciousness and will, it's the free part I dispute, especially as it relates to love.

Jamie_L

I'm also in the camp that disputes the assertion that so often is taken for granted:

Love requires free will.

Love is an emotion and a set of behaviors. An emotion is a response inside a mind to stimuli outside the mind (and, sometimes, perhaps to stimuli inside the mind as well).

If you could program a person to feel the emotion of love with respect to a certain person, why would that not be love anymore? If they felt all the feelings, responded with all the usual loving behavior, but it was because you programmed them that way rather than because of the way nature and nurture made them, why would that not be love anymore?

I think back to the movie A.I. (a movie I actually don't much care for). Here we have an artificial being programmed to love. He feels love. He acts lovingly in response to those feelings. Yet he doesn't really have the "free will" to not feel those feelings. But the feelings still are feelings of love, and he still acts lovingly.

"But that's just a movie," you say. Yes, but it shows that we can conceive of a being who is programmed to love. Someone needs to show me why that love is not really love. If it's just because it's not love by free choice, then that's a bit circular. Love requires free will because the definition of love is that it requires free will.

Assuming God is out there, none of us have any way of knowing for certain that those who love us aren't doing so because God made them. Yet none of us stay up nights worrying about that. Why? Because it doesn't matter. They love us, and that's what we really care about. Not whether or not they had a choice in the matter.

Jamie

long winded fool

But, is it omnibenevolent to program your children to love you? Don't we, as humans, require something to have the ability, if it ever desires, to not love us, if we are to call what it's doing love? If I beat the crap out of my kid and kick him out of the house, he might decide not to love me. As far as me and my kid are concerned, my kid has free will. Maybe not in an absolute sense, but just given the circumstances, he can refuse to love me if he wants to. I am not forcing him to love me. Now carry the analogy out to God and his children and it becomes absolute. If we are preordained by God and have no freedom to act on our own, there is no difference than me programming my kid to respond to every single stimuli with simulated love. As long as the kid has his own choice, he has free will. As long as we have choice, we have free will. Maybe we don't actually have choices, but since experience suggests otherwise, I think free will is a more logical assumption than predestination. In terms of the argument about God, the absence of free will contradicts the God of the Bible, not vice versa.

We either must have free will in order to love, or we must all be under the illusion of free will in order to be under the illusion of love. (It should be noted that for practical purposes, these two notions can be assumed indistinguishable.) We have to at least think that we have some other choice. The illusion of free will breaks down when we assume that God is omnibenevolent and that love is good. While my kid can just have the illusion of free will and still love me, free will must ultimately exist if God is omnibenevolent. In other words, the analogy breaks down when "dad" is creator God and "kid" is created humans. Once you get to that point, free will must be reinserted and "illusion of free will" can no longer logically be used.

luvluv

Jobar:

The question is, how do you move from God knowing that one sperm would succeed over all others from God CAUSING that sperm to succeed above all others?

Are you suggesting that God supernaturally takes over one spermatozoa and "steers" it on home?

luvluv

EGGO:

Well, as I asked Jobar, how exactly do you move from God KNOWING that you will be created with this mentality (you probably weren't CREATED with this mentality though, unless you were one smart zygote) to God CREATING you with this mentality.

God certainly knew you were coming, and He loved you before you got here, but He (probably) did not have any direct hand in the fact or the circumstances of your birth. Your parents choose to have you and here you are.

And you are speaking of your disbelief as if it is something that has happened to you, like it is like having cancer or being short. But if free will is real, you can come to believe one day.

Pyrrho

According to most Christians, god created the universe and made it what it is. So, everything that follows from that is essentially his doing. So god, having made the sperm cells what they are, made the one such that it would succeed and the others fail, when in the situation that god knew would come about. So god obviously caused that sperm cell to fertilize that egg cell. And, if god knows that I will do a certain thing, then I am not free to act otherwise. If I were, then I could make god wrong, and, supposedly, god cannot be wrong. So I have no choice but to do whatever it is that god knows I will do. The supposed fact of creation, combined with omnipotence and omniscience, makes god the author of all that occurs.

NearNihil Experience

The question was, "How do we know God wants us to have free will?"

The answer is that we can not know, for knowing whether we are free or not takes away our freedom to choose whether or not we are free. Knowing for sure that I am, or am not free, relegates me to the position that I know yes or no, and I am thefore not free to choose whether or not I am free.

We can not know whether or not God wants us to have free will because if we are given knowledge of such we are confined to that knowledge, and freedom to choose is lost.

IOW, if God tells me I am free, I am not longer free to choose whether I am free or not. And if God tells me I am not free, then I am not free and have not will to choose free or not free. He is God afterall and whatever He says goes...Good thing He hasn't said anything about it yet...

Then again, I think the words Free Will and God make no sense anyway...

Shinobi

I don't know if this has already been asked but do animals have free will? bacteria? What are the repurcussions for the xian position from the answer to this question?

Jamie_L

One question at a time. You bring up good points, but they are separate points from the issue of "is free will required for love?" The answer of "why would God value free will?" may not hinge on the relationship between free will and love. However, I believe that saying free will is required for love is incorrect. Thus, using that as an explanation for why God values free will is faulty, or at least incomplete.

Almost all explanations I've heard for why free will is required for love tend to boil down to "Well obviously it's not love if you're programmed to love."

All I'm saying is that it's not so obvious to me.

Jamie

long winded fool

I suppose you're right. If free will were required for love, then I think this would be the easy answer. I assumed that most would agree that the illusion of free will, at least, exists. I also assumed that most would agree that this illusion, if that's indeed all it is, must be actualized before love as humans understand it can be defined. Maybe it isn't as clear as I originally thought.

If we want to explore this line of reasoning as a possible solution to how we (or theists) could know that God values free will, we need to agree on a definition of love. I don't think that love is defined without some other accessible choice that is equivalent to not-love. If this is the case, all beings who are to be considered capable of love must, at some level, have the ability to actualize whatever this notion of not-love is. This ability I include under the blanket term "free will." I argue that at least this much free choice must logically exist in humans if they are capable of what we call love. Therefore at least that much free choice must exist if love is good and God is omnibenevolent. Therefore at least that much choice must exist if we assume the God of the Bible as a premise. Therefore God must value free choice.

There are many other definitions of the terms I use. I beleive I'm using the most common and generally accepted ones, however I'm more than willing to explore less common interpretations. Maybe "love" really is nothing but a programmed response to other programmed stimuli and choice is completely absent from the transaction. I think with this assumption, we'd fall back to the "free will is an illusion" argument, which from a strictly human point-of-view, (one which no one can escape,) is really just renaming the term. Adding "illusion" in front of the word "free will" is pointless if this illusion is absolutely impenetrable for those attempting to comprehend it. I don't think humans can function without this notion (illusion or not) therefore I feel justified in presuming the illusion of free will and actual free will as being, for all practical purposes, the same for all beings who experience it.

We can wonder if maybe humans don't ultimately have any free will at all, but we must always privately believe that we do in order to be sane human beings. Humans can't function if they know they are predestined. They have to think that their actions can affect the future.