Eight revealing questions (continued with questions 1-4)
Now to go about answering those eight questions:
1. The first question is: does God know my choice? Even though the choice I have made or will make had not yet happened before I made it, in as far as they are bound in time and based on the testimony of Scripture; I can say that God knew the choices I would eventually make.
2. If that is true then we must also ask the question, was my choice free? And again, based on Scripture, I say yes, God can know what I will choose and my choice remains free. My freedom is established in the fact that I choose according to my strongest desire. As a mater of fact I will always choose based on my strongest inclination which I am capable of fulfilling. My will not only influences my decisions, it determines them in the immediate sense. The fact that I always do what I want to do establish the compatibility between God’s ordination and knowledge of my choice and the freedom of my choice.
3. Can I be forced to choose something that I ultimately do not want? 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 circumstance 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 seems to be his strongest desire because he cannot choose 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 to fly 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. This is the futile wish, and it is most probably the exclusive province of sentient beings and a condition of the fall, because we know that we will not even be able to desire anything we cannot do or have in the eternal state with God. So once in God’s eternal presence we will have no need or want for things we cannot have; there will be no futility to our desires. Perhaps Hell in some 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 example illustrates both a lack of capacity and a conflict between contiguous desires, desires that appear to be very close in strength with an 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 when your abductor turns his back or leaves the room but it would 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. 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 in order to free yourself. 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? Now it becomes a matter of discretion rather 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 that was your strongest desire. 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.
c. 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 (the motivation to preserve my life) was altered, thus the conflict was no longer simply between turning left or right. The conflict would then be between turning right and preserving my life, and 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 I develop two very important presuppositions: 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 natural capacity to do. Thus I have also answered the next question.
4. Why do I choose what I choose? The answer is very simple; I choose what I choose because my choice reflects the desires of my heart.
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