Determinism versus Free Will

Today is "A day in the life of Luther Seminary" in school. I met with about ten perspective students for an entire evening and tomorrow to assist discerning their calls. The lecture by Lois Malcolm was really something. It was almost like an intense and invigorated hour long homily. She mentioned that our will is bonded to our sins but Jesus liberated us and bestow us with complete freedom to serve our neighbors. Basically she mentioned that our will is still bound, but in regard to service for the kingdom of God, it is completely free. It is not her idea but Luther's. I have no qualms with that. One issue I struggled over the years is that I don't think predestination and condemnation are compatible concepts.

It has been said that the universe is a representation of wills. The interesting question is do mortals, sentient beings, have any contribution to this representation. I think the sovereignty talks from the Calvinists are quite silly. The God which they put inside a box is incapable of choosing against having total and exhaustive control of everything in the universe. That idea actually renders God completely unsovereign. If God is truly all powerful, He can still use, combine, or work around our wills dispite the fact that our wills don't necessarily align with His. Another problem with the whole idea of sovereignty and predestination is that how can any of us be blamed for anything we do wrong if they have been planned out and determined from the beginning, and all we do is to act it out?

On the flipside, I don't think we have free will. We have a will, but is neither free from external circumstances nor from our internal personalities and preferences. The will is bound, not free. The reason I wrote this blog is because I was influenced by Lois Malcolm speech today and Karen Gutzman's comment a few Monday's ago. My decision to write this entry is based on external factors and internal factors. I am an introvert and a nerd, and that's the internal factor. It is affected by my genetic predisposition which I did not choose. People with more money and powerful might have better control over their circumstances or contigencies of their environment, but nobody is truly free from it.

The concept of free will is a modern invention and is popular in today's modern world and often goes unchallenged. It matches with our ideas of "the American dream" or "those who tries hard will succeed." Or the current idea of justice: "if you committ the crime, you do the time." We put a bank robber in jail and not members of the person's dysfunctional family in jail or creators of violent movies or music or whoever else contributed to this person's circumstance or whoever put the idea in this person's head in the first place. If a person truly has free will, is the person guilty of his or her crime? I would argue the opposite. If a person's will is so free that it completely transcends this person's external and internal contingencies, then whatever this person did is created ex nihilo. It has absolutely nothing to do with this person. Well, then, how can such person be credited or blamed or anything good or bad?

Determinism vs Free Will is really difficult to understand. I want to pull my hair out just by thinking about it. Hopefully I'll have better ideas in the future as I receive more education.

The Meaning of Truth

My last blog entry seemed to have transpired a light year ago. This inactivity is attributed to my full time school and full time job. I have a lighter work load this spring. My thursday night class was cancelled due to the lack of students (damn you! Grey's Anatomy!), and I don't plan on adding another class.

I felt obliged to write this blog because questions about the meaning of truth have surfaced in many of my classes and private conversations. What is the definition of truth? What do you mean objective truth is unattainable? It is nearly impossible to provide a satisfactory explanation in a class room setting because, quite frankly, I believe that a philosophical system which can be fully explained in two minutes is no use for human intellect. Obvious there is not enough time for a long discourse in this matter during a class. However, I really do need to find a quick and dirty way to explain this. It is good for me now to practice articulating my ideas about this very subject. I am sure another discussion about the concept of truth will emerge again in the very near future. With luck, I'll might even get some feedbacks from one or two of you who actually read my blogs.

The simplest way I can define truth is this: truth is a proposition which is logically coherent within a given set of other propositions. This implies that an absolute truth is logically coherent with absolutely everything including phenomenon that are completely beyond our senses. This definition sounds really bizaare and intellectually unsatisfying, but I don't think there are other definitions that work. Just hang on a little bit.

A common sense definition is that truth is what the Reality is. There are two difficulties with that definition. First of all, we really have to prove that there really is something out there. Second of all, that definition is completely useless. From the human perspective, the reality can always be logically defined as a set of known's and unknown's. How can we attest that the truth that we obtained can correspond perfectly with the unknown portion of the reality? This is the problem with science right now. At first we thought Newton's laws perfectly represents the reality, but physicists found out that they are merely approximations. At our present state of science it has been said that if our ignorance is the sea, our knowledge is merely a drop of water. We are not anywhere close to attainment of omniscience of the universe.

Sadly, the definition I proposed rendered truth a relative property. The implication is that genuine knowledge is not grounded on the Absolute but rather grounded on logical coherence. Thusly it is paramount that we expand our body of knowledge as large as we possibly can. Because in order to establish genuine knowledge, we not only have to test it against our observations but also against other bodies of knowledge. Therefore, the larger our body of knowledge is, the more accurate the model of reality is.

Everything I have touched on so far can be applied to biblical exegesis. A "True" interpretation is the one which is coherent with the reality. Unfortunately we have neither the access to the authors nor the non-known portion of the reality which I spoke off. There are just so many things in the biblical worlds which we don't know about.