Donald Sensing has written a good amount (including his MS thesis) on the subject of human free will, but I have another question: does God have free will?
On one hand, if God is all-powerful and reigns supreme over the entire universe, then it seems logical to conclude that he has free will. But on another, subtly compelling hand, can God lie? Could Jesus have sinned while he was on earth, and simply chose not to? Or, because of his divine nature, would it have been impossible for Jesus to murder, rape, steal, or disbelieve? If God is perfect, then in any given circumstance he must perform the perfect action. Can multiple actions be equally perfect? Considering that God knows the ultimate result of any action he may take, it doesn't seem likely that any two alternate decisions would end up with the exact same level of holiness.
Perhaps it would be impossible for God to lie, by definition. Whatever God says is True; anything that disagrees with God is False. Any decision God makes is Perfect, by virtue of the fact that he made it. That sort of reasoning (legitimate as it may be) does not easily extend to Jesus in the flesh. Living as a mere man, Jesus voluntarily decided to restrict his power and his actions, even though he had the authority to take whatever he wanted and to kill whomever he pleased. Looking at Jesus doesn't necessarily give us a true picture of God's behavior. Absent these assumed restraints, could Jesus have succumbed to Satan's temptations?
It would be hard to believe that I have a more free will than God himself has. If mankind was created in God's image, then we must share his essential attributes, and he ours.
OTOH, in creating anything, God necessarily created that which was not God. God produces, but not reproduces. So we creatures, being limited in every respect, may enjoy more freedom, relatively speaking to our creatureliness, than God does to his God-ness.
Hm, so maybe our limitations give us more freedom, as a sort of side-effect? I don't know. If that's the case, then an argument can be made that such freedom isn't a good thing -- how can we, in any way, be more good than God? And of course, it's not good to use free will to choose to do things that displease God.
But free will is such a fundamental part of our nature that it must be good. We became sinful on our own, but God created mankind with free will.
We enjoy more freedom relative to our natures as created beings? I'm not sure I follow what you're saying.
It seems to me that God has just as much free will as we do. The argument here is one of terminology rather than action.
God cannot do "evil," because everything God does is, by definition, "good." In a similar way, the only reason you can do evil is because you are not God. To wit, I can never, in my life, perform an action that I "do not perform." As soon as I undertake the action, it can no longer be called "an action I do not perform," and hence, the statement remains true in the present. You, however, can perform an action I do not perform without changing the connotation of that statement, because you are not the individual whose actions define the term.
In other words, the term is malleable because its existence is predicated upon the immediate status of a singular individual. Any other individual is free to violate its conditions at will. Hence, we impose the "limitation" on God by simply defining our terminology to match his historical record of action and statements of motivation.
It is, however, an illusion of wordplay, as the restriction is in the term's definition rather than upon the actions of the standard-bearer, so I do not believe it would in any way be an impairment of God's free will.
You're assuming God is bound by our concept of logic and rationality!
But yes, it's mostly sophistry.
I don't believe it's possible for an entity to give/grant an ability that it doesn't already possess, i.e, how can God give man free will if He doesn't have it?
But then again I'm just a mere mortal of twenty some-odd years trying to explain something that the Church has tried to tackle with the greatest minds for over 2,000 years... ;-)
because God defines the very fabric of existense this should mean that it is his decisions that define what is moral and what is not moral and because he exists outside/above the confines of time then unlike the pope he is not bound by tradition or precedent.
i should also like to remind anyone reading this that we are talking of an all intelligent all powerful God. If most of us cannot understand the work of Einstein a man with an IQ just over 180 then how can we understand that of a being whose IQ is infinite?