I really appreciate this address.
It is long, thoughtful, and engages the concerns.
If difficult, I'd suggest it is this kind of work that is necessary before anything can ever be established. It lays ground work for meaningful. I'd suggest that this piece, though long and labored, was worth your time. With this, I'd suggest posting less and more meaningfully as such and as time allows.
It is some of the better writing I've seen you do.
Will not. Do you know how many technical papers and books there are on this subject in secular and evangelical circles? I am satisfied with my statement based on decades of reseach to the best of my ability. Do I want to start trying to distill this into posts that few will read? No.
I have given links before or pointed to research. The fact that it is debated in great detail beyond most of our grasps shows that I cannot prove it in a post or two.
As long as you are going to water down libertarian free will with compatibilistic pseudo-free will, I will never be able to prove anything. We are talking different languages.
I have given this before. It is not modal logic in great detail. If you can't agree with this, you won't agree with a 20 page proof of it either.
"If an act be free, it must be contingent. If contingent, it may or may not happen, or it may be one of many possibles. And if it may be one of many possibles, it must be uncertain; and if uncertain, it must be unknowable."
This makes sense to me. If free will is genuine, EDF becomes impossible. To retain EDF, we have to tinker with genuine contingency.
Further, "A certain event will inevitably come to pass, a necessary event must come to pass, but a contingent event may or may not come to pass. Contingency (free will) is an equal possibility of being and of not being."
Simple, until you start making it cloudy by talking about causative desires that God gives and still claiming freedom. If there is an element of uncertainty in contingent choices, and there is (self-evident....chocolate or vanilla, unknown for sure until I choose), then EDF is logically impossible for all moral and mundane choices of all creatures for all times from eternity past.
You value Skinner more than you are admitting here. I absolutely hated his propositions built upon Pavlov's work. "Man is a machine" is just so tasteless, offensive, and simplistic for complexity. I deeply thought it unmade 'uniqueness,' individuality, seredipity, and meaningful relationship when I first glimpsed it.
Several Bible passages have spoken to me since then. Romans 9:14, 16, 20-21.
Mat 10:38 Ecc 1:13 Ecc 6:10
I do not despair in gloom for such as I once did. I would deny that which screamed against individual, unique identity. After reading these scriptures, it is a profound thing that the God of the universe cares about a created thing. I have pictures I've created that I enjoy, but I have no inkling how God can have relationship with that which He has created. I would find it very difficult to make a robot that I cared about even if all the right qualities were programmed in. In the end, there would have to be a special kind of 'magic' for me to care about my creation. This 'magic' is often the stuff of freewill discussion and I have valued it.
Going back to your and my 'flavor' discussion. You know, I'm programmed somehow, whether by circumstance or genetic malfunction or a combination, to like vanilla over chocolate. I do not grieve over the chocolate loss I experience and I cannot fathom it makes a difference if it is a programmed response, a genetic disposition, or just a preference of some free choice. I'd say I don't have a freewill decision in the matter. I don't really like chocolate. God has made me the way I am. David was 'formed' in the womb by God, which speaks to the way we are made. I was made for banana, vanilla, butterscotch, and nut flavors.
This is why a common explanation to justify EDF rests on specious 'eternal now', indefensible simple foreknowledge, or crass determinism/omnicausality. You can assume these things and beat the chest that you have proven EDF, but if the basic assumption is wrong, it is simply begging the question.
"The future choice of holiness or sinfulness (or whatever) is, therefore, a thing now wholly undetermined, and hence an unknowable thing. And being an unknowable thing, its prescience involves an absurdity, and hence ignorance thereof necessitates no imperfection in Deity."
Since I wrote these quotes on scrap paper almost 30 years ago, I do not know the sources. Could be Hasker, Pinnock, who knows? They were also in a larger context of more detailed proof.
Boyd has some charts or appendix that Bob Hill linked somewhere (from "Satan and the problem of evil"; Methodist Lorenzo McCabe has some early papers that also 'proved' these things...part way down on this link
http://www.revivaltheologypromotion.org/rtpfullcat.htm).
Pinnock: "The distinction between what is possible and what is actual is valid for God as well as for us. The past is actual, the present is becoming, and the future is possible (rulz-not yet)."
Hasker (about omniscience) "It is impossible that God should at any time believe what is false, or fail to believe any true proposition such that His knowing that proposition at that time is logically possible."
Is it logically possible to know in advance as a certainty something that is contingent, possible, may or may not be?
Hence, EDF of future free will contingencies is a logical absurdity (despite loopholes like compatibilism, eternal now, determinism, objections about Peter or Judas, tradition, etc....we can deal with these in detail, one by one...it certainly has been done extensively in the literature on both sides."
There are many ways to address these concerns or obviously we wouldn't have differing Arminian and Calvinist positions on the matter.
One is that all is predetermined and known. Another is that all contingencies are known so the outcome isn't any kind of surprise but meticulously calculated, which may fit with some OVer's stance (like billions of VCR tapes that show all possible scenarios).
For me, the answer is that God knows innately by His sustaining presence. All things proceed from Him and therefore are ordained, known, and intimately part of Him in proceeding from Him. There is no autonomy in this view. In order to do anything, I have to breathe, and in order to do that, it is sustained by His very self.
John 15, Colossians 1 Acts 17:28
The freedom we find in Christ 1Pe 2:16 is freedom of bondage from sin and freely bound to Him as slaves of righteousness.
