Eight Revealing Questions: Questions #3 & #4: Installment #5

Revealing Questions Concerning the Will of God Over His Creation:
Installment number five: Question #3

In the following discourse, I have also answered the next question in this discussion as well, question #4, Why do I choose what I choose? The answer to this is very simple as it was answered in installment #4 as we discussed question #2, I choose what I want to choose, well...because I want to; because that is my strongest desire.

The primary question to be answered in this installment is this: can I be forced to choose something I do not want? Ultimately I would say no, not if I have the capacity to do that which I desire. Following are three examples used to illustrate this point.

a. Perhaps one day I decide I would like to fly by my own power, no assistance, no wings, and no devises. Right up front we must acknowledge the fact that I do not have the capacity of unassisted flight and my shear willing it to happen is unrealistic and irrational. So if two choices are before me, under normal circumstances I will always choose that which I most strongly desire; that to which I am most strongly inclined. But this situation is abnormal. Nearly every kid has at one time or another wanted to simply jump into the air and fly. He may even have a very strong desire to fly. However, he may not legitimately choose that which only seems to be his strongest desire because he is not capable of choosing it. He may have a powerful inward desire to fly but he is incapable of inclining himself to fulfill it. This leads us to a consequent question, can one actually desire most strongly, that for which he has no natural capacity? I may have a strong inclination toward flying, but I have no empathetic understanding of its mechanics, thus I do not understand what it would really mean to fly; I am not actually aware of the work and effort that would be involved, therefore I do not actually desire to fly, but what I desire is my understanding of what flying is. I desire a caricature of flying, but not flying itself. So I conclude that one cannot most strongly desire that for which one has no natural capacity to do or to even understand. I call this the futile wish, and it is most probably relegated to the human race and a condition of the fall, as a consequence of our depravity, because we know that we will not be able to desire anything we cannot do or have in the eternal state with God. Perhaps Hell, at least in part, consists of eternally unfulfilled futile wishes and unsatisfied desires.

b. The second example is only slightly different. Imagine being tied to a chair by an abductor. This illustration tries to answer the question, what if I can’t do what I want. This example illustrates both a lack of capacity and a conflict between what I call contiguous desires, or desires that appear to be very close in intensity or strength, with a nearly inappreciable difference. In this situation, you would obviously have a very strong desire to be free. On the one hand, you may actually be able to free yourself from the chair when your abductor turns his back or leaves the room but the success of this venture may result in having to pull one of your wrists out of socket, or cut off your hand by vigorously rubbing it against the cords with which your hands are tied. So your choice now is between your desire to be free and your desire not to remove your hand. Even these choices lend themselves to a degree of capacity—can you actually pull your wrist out of socket, will the cord cut through your hand, or can you twist your arm enough to pull your hand off at the wrist. If you are able to do either of these things, would you desire strongly enough to do so, or would your desire to not pull your wrist out of socket, cut it or pull it off out weight your desire to be free? Even if you are able to free yourself in one of these ways, you must also consider what would happen next. Will you bleed to death from your wounds? Once you are free from the chair will you then be able to defend yourself with such a handicap? At this point (assuming you can break free by removing your wrist) and weighing all these nuances together, it becomes more a matter of discretion than capacity. Though you have a very strong desire to be free from the chair you choose not to remove or dislocate your hand because keeping your hand intact in the end was a stronger desire than your desire to free yourself in that way. Though you very much want to be free, your stronger desire is to leave your hand attached to your arm, so in the end you chose the strongest between several contiguous desires, thus the rule was not violated—you were not actually hindered from doing that which you desired most strongly, it only appears so because, of the choices you had, the two strongest desires were so close in strength, but in the final assesment you chose according to your strongest desire, thus you were not made to choose something you did not want to choose.

c. Here is the third example which describes how we all choose accoding to our strongest desire and we are never compelled to choose something outside of our nature, thus we remain volitional creatures as God has created us:

Imagine I am driving down the road with every intention of taking a right at the next stop light however, as I sit in line waiting for the light to turn green a man jumps in the back of my car and while holding a gun to my head he demands that I turn left at the light and insists that he will kill me if I don’t do as he says. I now have an added element in the choice I would make. Had the man never jumped in my car I would have turned right because that is the direction I most strongly desired to go. But now, because of the threat to my life (which will end up being a determining cause in my choice) I choose to turn left. Does this mean that I have done something that I did not want to do? While I would have had the desire and the capacity to turn right at the light, my stronger desire was to save my life by turning left. Because of the introduction of another efficient cause (the threat to my life) the formal cause (my motivation) was altered, thus the conflict was no longer simply between turning left or right. The conflict would then have been between turning right (as I initially intended) and turning left in order to preserve my life. Because I more strongly desired to preserve my life than to turn right, I fulfilled my stronger affection toward one of two contiguous desires by turning left. So again, I surmise that I cannot ultimately be forced to do something that I don’t want to, and I cannot actually desire that which I have no capacity to do.

For a little background, a philosopher named Aristotle lived in the 4th century BC and was the teacher of Alexander the Great, and the student of another prominent philosopher named Plato. It was in that environment where he developed the "four causes of nature" as an answer to the question: why does anything exist rather than nothing? I used these ideas to help answer the question in the previous paragraph. The four causes are these: material, efficient, formal, and final.

1. The material causes of my choice to turn left were the things that had to exist for my choice:

my existence, the road, the intersection, etc.

2. Some of the efficient causes for my turning left were:

the threat to my life, the place I want to go, etc.

3. Some of the formal causes were:

all the motivating causes like, the gunman and my desire to preserve my life,

4. The final causes for my choice to turn left:

my stronger desire to turn left over my weaker desire to turn right, and ultimately, and at the same time, God's decree for me to turn left.