Here is a deep thought to chew on: The will is not a cause; it is an effect, whose cause is conation. “Acts of the will cannot come to pass of themselves,” writes Arthur Pink. “To say they can is to postulate an uncaused effect.” John Frame concurs, saying, “The very idea of a ‘will’ which exists in some independence from the person, the intellect, and the emotions, is deeply problematic.” [1]

Choice is a term describing a circumstance appropriate to volition or acts of will, which are determined (causally necessitated) by the mental activity of conation. The term conative (desire) describes one of the three aspects of the human mind, the other two being cognitive (intellect) and affective (emotion); [2] as such, the conative consists of the cognitive and affective and causally produces how one acts on them. Therefore, as Arthur Pink astutely noted: if volition or the will is the effect of these causal faculties, then it is subject to them; if it is subject to them, then it is not sovereign; if it is not sovereign, then we cannot predicate freedom of it.

But freedom should not be predicated of faculties at any rate, but rather of agency. As John Locke wrote, “Liberty is not an idea belonging to volition or preferring, but to the person having the power of doing, or abstaining to do, according as the mind shall choose or direct.” [3] I reference him not as an authority but as having raised a very good point. As the agent is free and not his will, so we should reject ‘free will’ in favour of ‘free agency’.

References:

1. On Arthur Pink: see Chapter 7 of his The Sovereignty of God, under the heading “The nature of the human will.” On John Frame: see his answer to the question on “Agent Causation and Free Will,” as well as the article “Perspectivalism 101” by his friend Joseph Torres.
2. See the article on “Conation” at Wikipedia.
3. “Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” which can be found in print in Modern Philosophy: An Anthology of Primary Sources from Hackett Publishing Company, 1998, by Roger Ariew and Eric Watkins, eds.

During a pastoral conference lead by John Piper a few years ago, he was discussing how well John Newton used language to convey a message in his preaching.^[1]

Most of us gravitate to abstractions… we say, ‘Men are foolish to fret so much over material things when they will inherit eternal riches.’

Newton says, ‘Suppose a man was going to New York to take possession of a large estate and his carriage should breakdown one mile before he got to the city, which obliged him to walk the rest of the way to the inheritance. What a fool we should think him if we saw him wringing his hands and blubbering out all the remaining mile, ‘my carraige is broken! my carriage is broken!’.

This was one of several humourous and clever illustrations that Piper used to bring Newton to life. John Newton clearly had a gift with the use of language. In fact Piper believes that this kind of preaching is a matter of life and death in our churches. Maybe so? But I do know that I wish there were more people ministering in our churches who spoke like that!

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Footnotes:

1. John Newton was an 18th Century Clergyman and the writer of the famous hymn Amazing Grace

Last year as part of our Sydney Anglican Church “Connect Groups”^[1] we met to study the doctrinal framework of the Australian Fellowship of Evangelical Students (AFES), whose intention it is to make clear what it means to be a Bible-believing Christian. Although I have previously considered the authority claims of the Bible, this study really made me think more about this issue than I had previously. Phillip Jensen and Tony Payne provide commentary on all nine of the doctrinal statements made by the AFES in the Matthias Media publication The Blueprint^[2]. This article is concerned only with the first of those statements:

The divine inspiration and infallibility of Holy Scripture, as originally given, and its supreme authority in all matters of faith and conduct.^[3] [emphasis mine]

Infallibility has to do with the trustworthiness of Scripture. So by implication the AFES seem to be affirming that the Bible is completely reliable when it comes to religious or spiritual issues, but not necessarily when it comes to other issues like science or history. Or as Jensen and Payne put it more explicitly, “… Scripture is limited to matters of faith and conduct. The Scriptures do not claim to be an authority in calculus, nuclear physics, poetry or chess”^[4] [emphasis mine]. For textual support they cite 2 Tim 3:16-17; possibly the most popular proof text used to refute anyone who thinks that the Bible doesn’t make any restrictions on the kinds of subjects on which it speaks truthfully.

But then only two pages later… “The Scripture has authority over all matters on which it speaks. It is not exhaustive – it does not cover all matters – but because of its authorship its authority extends over everything it covers“^[5] [emphasis mine]. What then do Jensen and Payne mean when they talk of Scripture being limited to matters of faith and conduct? To avoid the confusion, I can only assume that what they mean is this:

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So here is a two-part philosophical question I would like to survey your thoughts on. And it is a two-part question because I am not sure if—or even how—it can be separated into distinct questions, so I’ll ask them together. (And this is a vitally important question to contemplate, for it possesses very serious ramifications for both ontology and epistemology together.)

1. Is there a difference between real and exist?
   1. Can something be real but not exist?
   2. Can something exist but not be real?

It almost seems as though there is no difference, that they are interchangeable terms; by saying that something is real we are saying that it exists, or by saying that it exists we are saying that it is real. That seems right. But is it? Is there no difference? What does it mean for X to be real?

Of course, we have to avoid the easy temptation of defining ‘real’ as correspondence to reality because, first of all, that would amount to an empty tautology which fails to impart any information and, more importantly, correspondence is widely recognized as a distinct theory of truth. (If reality is a predicate of truth, then ‘real’ and ‘true’ cannot be interchangeable terms. Think about it: if truth is that which corresponds to reality, and ‘real’ and ‘true’ both mean the same thing, then we are left with a theory that is not instructive. To say that “true is that which corresponds to truth” has about as much meaning as “real is that which corresponds to reality.”)

So if correspondence to reality is what it means for X to be true, then what does it mean for X to be real? Someone might suggest, “X is real when it has existence.” And therein lies the rub, calling upon the significance of my question. That statement seems to imply that if something does not exist then it is not real.

It’s an interesting question, and far deeper than it first appears. Should we understand that ‘real’ and ‘exist’ are two different things? But if ‘real’ and ‘exist’ don’t mean the same thing, then how can something be real but not exist, or exist but not be real?

If you have some insights or some probative questions that can help put this issue into gear, post your contribution in the Comments field. Or if you know a philosopher who has addressed this specific question, leave a recommendation.

Dennis Prager, Ultimate Issues (Jul–Sep. 1989)

When I meet someone who claims to find faith in God impossible but who persists in believing in the essential goodness of humanity, I know that I have met a person for whom evidence is irrelevant.

Dr. Terry Mortenson provides an excellent example of what evolution isn’t in his review of a 33-page 2004 National Geographic cover story which asked, “Was Darwin wrong?” It’s examples exactly like this that are typically paraded as evolution in action, when really it is nothing of the sort.

The bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, is troublesome to humans, but doctors can destroy it with an antibiotic. After the patient takes the antibiotic, it is absorbed through the cell wall of the bacterium. It has the genetic information to make an enzyme which reacts with the antibiotic converting it into a poison, killing the bacterium. But due to a mutation, some H. pylori cannot make the enzyme and so cannot convert the antibiotic and so do not die but reproduce, giving the patient and doctor a new problem. The mutant survived through a loss of information, which is not a process that will eventually lead to an increase of information to change a bacterium over millions of years into a biologist.

http://creation.com/national-geographic-is-wrong-and-so-was-darwin

In the scenario above the organism with the mutation has indeed – to use evolutionary language – gained an advantage over the other H. pylori in an environment with the antibiotic present. So has the H. pylori evolved? Well that depends on what you mean by evolution. I would ask, is the change that occurred in the organism in the direction for the bacterium to develop new body parts or body plans; is it on it’s way to becoming a baboon, a bird, or a badger? Most certainly the answer is NO. The information change is a negative one, not a positive one. In fact in this example not only is no new information created but the mutation destroyed the information in the bacterium’s genome that would normally have allowed it to produce an enzyme. So the non-evolved H. pylori can make the enzyme and the so-called evolved ones cannot. Yet examples just like this (information-destroying changes) are often used to provide support for macro evolution, which requires observable information-gaining changes.

If it makes it any easier to understand, believing that these kinds of changes support the evolutionary theory is analogous to believing that your bank balance will steadily increase the more money you take out. Wish I had a bank account like that!

One thing that hasn’t been abstaining from the news in the past fortnight is culture’s attitude towards sex. There are two counts in particular that caught my interest: one was State-side, aroused by curious questions from Oprah Winfrey on her namesake’s show; the other was a reactive orgasm from Australia’s media and some members of it’s Federal Government (including the Deputy Prime Minister, no less) towards remarks made by the Opposition Leader.

Both instances concerned the topic of sexual abstinence and, while both were delivered a world apart, both were raised in praise of abstinence. In the US, it was Bristol Palin’s (daughter of 2008 US vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin) commitment to abstain from sex until marriage; in Australia, it was Liberal Party leader Tony Abbott’s parental exhortation for his three daughters to remain virginal until marriage.

In either case, neither of the comments made were received with any measure of intellect. Just an incredulity and a penchant for political power play.

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