NationStates Jolt Archive

Smunkee's post in another thread was a good question but slightly off topic so I want to explore the issue above without the baggage of the other thread.

The ground work:

by serving God i am referring to the Judeo-Christian concept of God and serving Him

no christian bashing e.g. no ad hominem attacks, if you want to raise a point about free will v/s serving/omniscience/omnipotence that's fine

I'll open the discussion with St. Thomas Aquinas' work the Summa Theologica on free will Part 1, Question 83, Article 1
http://www.newadvent.org/summa/108301.htm

He insists we have free will because while we have appetites, by which he refers not only to desire for food and drink but also our emotions, we also have the ability for rational thought which we can but do not always allow to override our appetites.

He notes that when it says only God can draw us to Him, it is not because we do not have free will but that our free will is not powerful enough to sufficiently move us to Him.

We have will, but not freewill.

We can will ourselves to override our desires because we desire it, and we we desire it because of something, that something is controlling our will, thus we have no freewill.

I haven't seen many even decent arguements for freewill. You can always say that enviroment and circumstances pre-determined our will.

Someone might argue that freewill is the ability to understand the circumstances and make a free decision. I would reply, however, that the decision was made by a personality that had been shaped from all events in your life since birth, and that your personality decided what it thought was the best course of action systematically, through a complex thought-process.