Thursday, November 20, 2008
From 11/19: Born to be Free
Following our dissussion of evil, we considered how Aquinas's Natural Law can steer us towards the good. Returning to Augustine, we then debated whether human freedom and divine foreknowledge can coexist. Though God knows what lies in our future, Augustine nevertheless feels that this is a future that we freely choose. This raises the further question of whether God should have made us free if He knew that we would sin. Much to think about here - and feel "free" to bring in our feature presentation, The Name of the Rose.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
Aquinas' Natural Law claims to steer human beings and all beings toward good. The natural law takes the basic idea of Aristotle's division of the soul into three parts and then expands on what each soul should do in order to do good and avoid evil. As living beings we should preserve life, animal beings reproduce and raise children and rational beings pursue truth and uphold society. According to Aquinas, these precepts will ultimately lead humans to do good. The problem with this theory is that everyone must agree to this division of the soul, to the precepts themselves and must follow them for the law to hold true. This can prove to be very difficult considering that not EVERYONE will agree to these ideas and follow them in the way Aquinas intended. Augustine's ideas about free will and doing good raises another question. Whether or not God should have created us with free will while knowing that we could/would sin and do evil. According to Augustine, human freedom and divine foreknowledge can coexist. Again, I personally feel as though this is not an option. If God is all-knowing and knows we will/could sin, he is ultimately responsible for that sin. He created us with free will, knowing that we would use that free will to sin and do evil. Also, the fact that he knows if we will sin or not places some responsibility on Him. Although we as humans have free will and choose to do either good or evil, God gave us that free will and knows if we will sin, therefore He should not have created humans with free will if we were bound to sin from birth.
I agree with what Kelly said, it IS difficult to have something that EVERYONE agrees on. Aquinas' Natural Law seems too based on presumptions. Although I agree with the Fundamental Precept - do good and avoid evil- a fairly general concept... I am unsure about parts of the argument.
Eternal Law presumes that God exists, and that he did, indeed, create and "order" the universe (and the existence of God goes back to Agustine's dilemma with evil- and the existence of God in the face of that dilemma).
The Secondary Precepts say that as living beings- we preserve life... based on the assumption that life is valuable- something that I am unsure of. We are so impermanent, so brief in the big picture, how do we know that life is something to value? How can we ever answer that without knowing our purpose here.
They also say as rational beings- we pursue truth and uphold society- Is there actually "truth?" to find? something that we can say aha! we've found it? I don't believe anything like that exists, I think we occupy ourselves striving towards "truth" and upholding "society" giving ourselves pseudo-purposes so that we feel less insignificant in our existence in such an immense space of "time." I wonder if anything actually matters, or if anything is worth learning as with each newly acquired fact, an entire path of unknown is then opened to us, allowing us to see how much we don't know.
I do not think that human freedom and divine foreknowledge can coexist. If God created us knowing that we could potentially choose not to do the preferable thing-therefore sinning... then he is indirectly the creator of sin. If this is the case, then he is not perfect, etc- which destroys the possibility of his existence as he is known. If he is not perfect- then he is no different from any other person.
If God is all knowing and knew that we would sin with free will, then he must have known the consequences of not having free will and realized it was worse. For this discussion we assume that God knows all and is always good. If he is always good he must have chosen the better of the two choices. If we did not have free will we would be puppets and no longer his creation but his slaves to do whatever he wanted. God is loving and good so he would know this was bad, even though people do bad things everyday. We do not know Gods plan, maybe he saw in the future a peaceful eutopia where man is good and there is less evil in the world. In this discussion we assume God is all good and all knowing. This means we can’t blame him for the evil in the world because he is doing what is best for humans as a whole. He knows that man has good in him and has the choice to act on this.
For God to know we would ultimately excercise our free will in a way that would be sinful, and thus make God responsible, is a notion that is mentioned often. It has been said that God isn't responsible for our actions but, rather, has given us our free will. Knowing how we will excercise our wills, God doesn't directly control us and our actions but i think this would be the same as waving candy infront of a child and claiming not to be responsible for the child grabbing it and eating it. The person holding the candy knows what the child will do; this person knows the childs will. Just the same, God knows our wills- he created them- and so knows what each of us will do under certain circumstances. My question is: if God knows what our actions will be and knows we will sin and knows evil will exist, then why didn't he just create our wills such that we wouldnt have tendencies towards evil?
I think it's quite hard for anyone to dispute the eternal law argument. There is an order to the universe that we, with our primitive minds, simply don't have the ability to comprehend. Again, the natural law is quite a solid idea. If water reaches 32 degrees Fahrenheit, it freezes. that is a loose expression of the stated natural law, but an example of its truth nonetheless. The human law also makes sense, I also think that human laws should move according to natural laws. Yet the disparity that arises (I believe), is that it is quite difficult to truly understand the natural law, though I do think it is within the range of our minds to grasp. What happens is, people who study nature don't create laws, and people who make laws most certainly don't study nature.
Post a Comment