(This is Part 8 in a series. The rest can be found here. http://rakestrawjeff.blogspot.com/?m=1)
Recent experiments in neuroscience (by Benjamin Libet and others) have yielded some intriguing results when it comes to free will. The results would indicate that we start doing things before we decide to. I will not try to explain things I do not understand but neurologically speaking it seems it is becoming more difficult to assert that human beings have free will. (
I remember those discussions in college about how, if you knew the exact mass, velocity, and spin of every particle in the universe at any one moment in time you could theoretically predict everything that would happen. The universe we live in is just a mass of particles and physics, and human beings are made of matter, and subject to the same physical laws. The universe they taught me about in college was a deterministic one, with cause following effect, and every bit of it subject to immutable mathematical laws.
Fortunately for me and my precious free will, there have been a few new quirks added to physics, especially on the quantum side. Some of the work with particles and waves and string theory has called into question the determinism of our universe. Particles may or may not be at any given place at any given time. I will not try to explain things I do not understand but quantum physics has introduced uncertainty back into the equation.
UM-Rolla taught me the beauty of mathematics, and the need for the ideal world of math and physics to comply with the absolute world of sensual reality. I appreciate Plato and his forms as they provide the framework with which we understand the real world. Math and physics properly applied, from the correct premises, will tell us the nature of reality. On the other hand, you will know your premises are wrong when they contradict your observations in the real world.
The Romans invaded Britain in the first century and in 122 AD they built Hadrian’s Wall to mark the edge of the empire and presumably to keep southern Britannia safe from the Barbarians to the north. I have often wondered if that wall was built to protect my ancestors or to keep them out. There is no way of knowing but I suspect the latter. A couple of thousand years before the Romans and well before the Druids the people of this island built Stonehenge, and there has been civilization there since the last ice age ended 10,000 years ago and rising sea levels separated them from the rest of the continent.
In 360 AD a young man named Pelagius was born in Ireland (or northern Britain) who would come to oppose Augustine of Hippo and his idea of predestination. Pelagius would move to Rome around 380 where he became concerned about the state of society there. He began to oppose the Augustinian teaching of predestination and original sin. (
Augustine taught that when Adam sinned man fell in God’s eyes and every child is born with original sin as a result. Augustine taught that God exists outside of time, and therefore exists in all times and knows all of history, and always has. God therefore knows which of us will go to heaven and which to hell before we are born, with those who will go to heaven being the “elect”. Because God is omnipotent, it is for Him alone to decide who will receive salvation and who will not. Men cannot be saved without faith that is a gift of grace from God.
Pelagius taught that everything created by God was good, and so God would not create hopelessly sinful creatures. He felt that if God expected people to be good then it was possible for people to be good. Pelagius saw the influence of Augustine’s Manichaean past in what he viewed as a hopelessly sinful material world. Pelagius saw Augustine’s position as rejection of personal responsibility and refusal to accept the gift of free will. Augustine fought back, accusing Pelagius of excessive pride and disrespect for God’s divinity.
In 410 Rome fell to Alaric and the Visigoths, and Pelagius went to Jerusalem. Augustine pushed hard to have Pelagianism condemned and in 418, the year Pelagius died, it was. He was later declared a heretic. The views of Augustine on original sin and predestination and free will and the nature of God would form the basis of thought for the church as it faced the fall of the western half of the Roman Empire.
There are a thousand books on the fall of the Roman Empire, but I think it is fair to say that an empire based on expansion needs to keep expanding and that it will eventually collapse under it’s own weight. At some point people were walking by the ruins civilizations that had been superior to theirs and they knew it. They saw the evidence of ancestors who had risen above what they were capable of, and must have marveled at it. Or perhaps they became resigned to it. From time to time they would try to restore it.
It would be 400 years until Charlemagne, 800 years until Thomas Aquinas, and nearly a thousand years until Martin Luther. In that time the writings of Augustine would form the bedrock of Christian theology. His ideas on a “Just War” would set the stage for justification of a number of military campaigns, including the Crusades. His use of platonic forms would define Catholic liturgy. And his ideas on faith and grace and justification and salvation would form the basis for almost all subsequent Christian thought.
But a few questions remain.
-God is Omnipotent. God is Omniscient. God is Omni-Good. So why do bad things happen?
-What is the exact nature of God and our relationship to him?
-Why would an omnipotent God be involved in an ongoing cosmic struggle of good and evil?
-What is the precise nature of the relationship between the Father and the Son?
These questions and others will come up over and over and the differences of opinion will lead to splits in the Church and eventually to wars.
Did God give man free will, and the ability to choose good or evil? Did God set up a natural world for us that is governed by unchanging laws? Can men seek out and choose to have faith or is the contact always initiated by God?
We will talk about Luther and Calvin and the Reformation but for a moment let’s skip ahead to John Wesley, who founded the Methodist Church. Wesley came out of the Anglican Church after Luther and Calvin and the separation of the English Church from Rome. Wesley would spend considerable time in the New World spreading his Methodist ideas. Along with his brother Charles and George Whitefield John Wesley launched what would eventually become the largest denomination in America.
But there was to be trouble between Wesley and Whitefield, which would severely damage their relationship. Whitefield’s approach was decidedly Calvinist, while Wesley’s was decidedly Arminian. Wesley introduced the idea of “free grace”, and was hostile to predestination. Predestination was central to Whitefield, and he rejected Wesley’s ideas on free will. Their debate was quite public.
Jacobus Arminius was a Dutch pastor born in 1560 who argued that all men may accept or reject the gift of grace; that they have been given the free will to decide. Arminius and Calvin disagreed vehemently. A number of Methodists would adopt Arminian ideas, although there was a good part of rural America that would contain Calvinist Methodists as well.
“But what is Calvin, or what is Luther? Let us look above names and parties; let Jesus, the ever-loving, the ever-lovely Jesus be our all in all – so that he be preached, and his divine image stamped more and more upon people’s souls, I care not who is uppermost. I know my place, even to be the servant of all. I want not to have a people called after my name, and therefore act as I do. The cause is Christ’s, and he will take care of it.”
-George Whitefield
Skipping ahead to my story (which begins in the 1800’s), I believe my parents were both raised as Calvinist Methodists, but that the church that they moved to, that I was raised in, had more of a Wesleyan (Arminian) character. The hymns were all the comforting old hymns of Charles Wesley, but the message did not always match the rural (sometime fiery) theology of their youth. More on that later.
The world after Augustine and after the fall of the Western Roman Empire was tough and people had to work hard to survive. Technology and expectations did not change much from generation to generation. Most people did not read or write and there wasn’t much hope in this life, and so people looked to the next life for their hope. The church played a big role in their lives and society. That role would grow and change over time.
Like Augustine I have a less than perfect past. Like him I may have had a rebellious youth with perhaps a few sketchy associations (and associates) from time to time. I know that like everyone I fight to do what is right and I fail. Like Augustine I understand the pull of the material world and the difficulty in exerting control over our desires. I do believe that all men sin, meaning we all make the wrong choices and none of us are perfect.
I don’t think the material world, or the “world of the flesh” is inherently evil and tainted. I think we as mortal humans lack the ability to control our actions to conform to the ideal world that we imagine but cannot achieve. We are going to eat too much and drink too much and sleep too much and we will do stupid or immoral things for sex or drugs. And we will need to seek forgiveness. We are going to need to realize that we are flawed. And yet, I believe in the inherent goodness of man, despite his propensity to sin, and I believe in man’s free will to choose not only in his personal life but in terms of his faith.
I could simply argue that I think what I think because of the inevitable sequence of collisions of particles following the Big Bang which have caused the neurons in my brain to fire in a way that makes me think I have free will. And you may have read this for the same reason. If so, I will see you for Part 9. There should be some controversy in that one.
Next time we will look at the so-called Dark Ages and explore the thousand years from the death of Augustine to the birth of Martin Luther.
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