I had a great conversation with a colleague and fellow Christian today on the idea of free will. He, being a closet-Calvinist (what I call all Christians who do not yet realize that they are Calvinists), reasoned, as most pre-Calvinists do, that he chose God, and must have chosen God, for forced love is not love at all. Therefore, his un-forced love for God must mean his will is free to choose heaven or hell. There were more good points to his argument, but that was the thrust of it.
I completely agree that all people have the responsibility to choose whom they serve, just as it is our responsibility to keep all of God’s commandments. However, the built-in problem is that we are sinners unable to follow all God’s commandments, unable to choose what is good. I agree that I chose (and choose everyday) to follow Christ, but my question is: What made me choose Christ?
That’s where we get to the heart of the free will argument: no will is truly free. Every single choice I make, from the clothes I wear to the food I eat, I chose because of some other factor beside myself. Example: I wore a skirt today because I must look professional for my job, the weather is nice outside, I bought the skirt for ½ price, knee-length A-line skirts are in style (tho’ when are they not?), it looks good on me, it goes with the shirt color I feel like wearing, etc…… And the same list of prescripters could be given for the shirts I wore, the food I ate, and list goes on. For every decision I make.
Leo Tolstoy, in his masterpiece, War and Peace, (which I finished, finally, a week ago, yay!) discusses at length the notion of free will, though not from a theological standpoint (he makes that clear in the epilogue), but solely an historical one. He uses the same line of reasoning I demonstrated above, though much more pointedly, that though people FEEL that they are free to choose whatever they wish, their choices are actually governed by countless outside agents. His main analogy is of a person dropping his hand to his side, as if saying, ‘See, I just chose to do that of my own free will.’ Tolstoy argues that you dropped it in the direction you did because it was free of obstacles that might hurt your arm, because that way was most comfortable to you, and because you don’t have a prior arm injury that would’ve prompted you to otherwise drop your other arm, foot, or anything else. And let’s not forget that fantastic law that you’re depending on to make your “choice”: gravity.
I’m pretty sure that this line of reasoning is what made his novel so controversial: he quite adamantly downplays Napoleon’s impact on his own reign, going so far to say that Napoleon wasn’t that great of a general/emperor/war expert/whatever, but that really he was just in the right place at the right time and the people under him would surely have done the same things no matter who was leading. Quite a scandalous notion, having written this about a generation after Napoleon’s career, but the ideas are very logical, in that by the time the one general (the farthest removed person from the battlefields) hears of what is going on with the millions on the various battlefields, synthesizes the various reports, figures out a plan of action, and orders it of the various messengers who then take it back to the various battlefields to the millions, the time would have already passed for the necessary decision and Napoleon’s decrees would be moot. So therefore Napoleon really didn’t lead his troops when they were in battle; he was just an observer, being (as Tolstoy puts it) a pawn of fate or God.
If even the greatest (or the perceivably greatest) among us do not have a truly free will, then how much less do we normal people have one. The last words of his last epilogue frame the reason why people invented – and why they cannot let go of – the notion of free will: we trust our feelings more than our reason. Reason clearly tells us that every decision we make has a cause; it’s not just generated within us at random. Likewise, the Bible clearly shows God to be a God who chooses, from Jacob (“… whom I loved and Essau I hated…”) to Israel (“Mine elect” to Christ (“chosen before the foundations of the world” as the way to salvation) to each Christian. The theological idea of free will was invented long after the scriptures were written and considered heresy by the Christian Church many many times. And yet, for some reason, people would rather hold firm to an extrascriptural philosophy that elevates man and belittles God, and quite frankly all but claims salvation to be a work of man. Why do people do this? Because it fits with their feelings.
Tolstoy compares this to Copernicus’s discovery that the Earth moves around the still Sun. People refused to accept this because “the difficulty of recognizing the motion of the earth lay in abandoning the immediate sensation of the earth’s fixity and the motion of the planets, so in history [and theology] the difficulty of recognizing the subjection of personality to the laws of space, time, and cause, lies in renouncing the direct feeling of the independence of one’s own personality. But as in astronomy the new view said: ‘It is true that we do not feel the movement of the earth, but by admitting its immobility we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting its motion (which we do not feel) we arrive at laws,’ so also in history the new view says: ‘It is true that we are not conscious of our dependence, but by admitting our freewill we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting our dependence on the external world, on time, and on cause [and in theology, the work of the Holy Spirit], we arrive at laws.’
“In the first case it was necessary to renounce the consciousness of an unreal immovility in sace and to recognize a motion we did not feel; in the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious” (War and Peace, 1306).
Don’t trust your feelings, for they often tell you what you want to be so, where as your reason, through meditation on scripture, will tell you what God wills to be so.
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