Created Freedom Cannot Be True Freedom

9/3/2024

Kristor from the Orthosphere has posted a well-mannered rebuttal to my post from yesterday.

I respect Kristor. He’s a brilliant and well-read individual whose dogged pursuit of philosophical and theological matters deserves admiration. Having said that, Kristor also has a penchant for side-stepping or strategically working around assumptions he discerns as problematic.

My main point from yesterday’s post was straightforward. If God created my freedom, then my freedom is not really mine, nor is it really free. Freedom can only be truly free if it is uncreated — that is, not from God.

Kristor responded by citing actuality and claiming that actuality and freedom are mutually implicate.

I agree with that, but it doesn’t address the issue of where freedom originated.

When Kristor uses the term actual, he means beings who possess agency. Hammers are created and exist, but they are not actual because they cannot act and must be acted upon. Hence, hammers possess no freedom.

People, on the other hand, are actual beings because they can and do act from their freedom and agency. Thus, Kristor argues that it would be impossible for God to create an actual being that was not free. It’s a sort of two-in-one, can’t-have-one-without-the-other package deal. And since God creates actual beings, he also creates the freedom actual beings possess.

Okay, but this is precisely the assumption that I am contesting, backed by the simple premise that if God automatically made me free when he created me as an actual being, then my freedom is entirely of God — ergo, not really mine, not really free.

For clarity's sake, I will briefly outline a few of my basic metaphysical assumptions.

I assume that I existed before my present form. I possessed some degree of freedom and agency before God created me into His Creation, and I brought this freedom and agency with me into Creation as a being. God created my present form, but He did not create my freedom because my freedom was already there, uncreated in my prior form as a being.

The existence of this uncreated freedom in Creation is what makes beings in Creation truly free. Moreover, it also coherently absolves God from being regarded as the ultimate source of evil.

God is the Creator, and this is His Creation. Yet His Creation contains features He did not create, primarily, the inherent freedom and agency of eternally existing beings.

I understand the above will strike Kristor as anathema because he views freedom from within the framework of a different set of assumptions, including belief in creatio ex nihilo and the Omnigod, which I reject.

14 Comments

Kristor link

9/4/2024 08:43:25

Thanks, Francis. Courteous conversations about disagreements are so much more pleasant than the discordant sort.

God created your toes. Does that mean they are not really toes? Does it mean they are not really your toes, but rather his? No, obviously it does not. From the fact that God creates something it simply does not follow that it is not really what it is. This is so whether God creates ex nihilo or from matter. If it did follow, it would follow under either of those notions of creation.

You write that, “Freedom can only be truly free if it is uncreated.” Why? I mean, it is obviously true that freedom can be absolutely unconditioned and thus totally unconstrained only if it is uncreate. I think perhaps that it is such absolutely unconditioned and unconstrained scope of action that you are denoting by “freedom.” But it is possible to be only partly constrained by prior conditions, such as a creator, and otherwise free. I take that to be our true predicament. We are conditioned, our options constrained by priors. But we are not robots. We do act. We are then to some extent free.

I don’t think of your metaphysical supposition as anathema, but rather as simply problematic, in lots of ways. The one that leaps out at me most forcefully these days I already posted about the other day: if there are many coeternal beings, and God is but one among them, with us, and with the angels and the demons, then Satan is not wrong – indeed, none of the coeternals could in that case be properly construed as wrong (for, on what objective basis, somehow prior to the myriad coeternals, could such a judgement be founded?) – but rather merely disagrees with God about the best way to be. He is not therefore evil, and so there is no reason not to worship or imitate him. By the same token, there is no particular reason to worship or imitate him, or God either; for, after all, those who might do so are coeternal with them, and could just as well and rightly worship or imitate any other of the myriad coeternal beings, or none of them, or for that matter themselves. Were there myriad coeternals, it would I suppose be most efficient and safest for each of them to simply worship itself, and have done with the others. Why any such utterly independent and sui generis coeternal would want to submit to participating a world project of any other is a mystery; certainly none of them could be forced thus to partake. Their natural reaction to such a proposal would seem to be, “non serviam!” But that is the morality of Aleister Crowley. It just doesn’t look like the world I see around me; does not ring true to the moral reality I apprehend.

Francis Berger

9/5/2024 13:08:27

@ Kristor - Thanks for the response. Comparing toes to freedom is what you would refer to as a category error.

Anyway, for the sake of argument, let's assume God creates freedom when he creates us as actual beings. Okay, but what is the nature of that created freedom? Would it be fair to say that it is determined freedom--that is, freedom determined by God? If this is so, then God does not really care about man's freedom. He's simply seeking a response to Himself, one He initated when He gifted man with freedom. And the doctrine of free will? Doesn't it do little more than make man accountable for the evil in the world? Boiling down freedom to the choice between following God's law or rejecting it enslaves man to the necessity of choices externally imposed upon him, all driven by the fear of eternal damnation and punishment.

Bruce noted something similar the other day on his blog, "Because because if God created absolutely everything that exists, then the desire to resist God must ultimately have been created by God Himself - as must all evil. Saying that God gave men Free Will does not answer this - because agency can only operate using the materials provided by God, which must mean that God made the evil in the first place, for evil to be choose-able."

I could go on, and I know you have perfectly coherent answers for all these concerns and incoherences, but for me, God just becomes more comprehensible and logicial when we take created freedom out of the equation. There is much in traditional theology that is problematic. Much. And it has never been satisfactorily explained, mostly because of the insistence that freedom, like everything else, must come from God.

Freedom is paramount and extends well beyond acting and being "to some extent free." Freedom is spiritual essence.

Concerning co-eternals, we are eternal after we die, are we not? Either in Heaven or in Hell or perhaps other places in between. Why is it so inconceivable to believe that we were eternal before we were born?

9/6/2024 00:56:15

Not to tire you with responses that by your own testimony cannot sway you, but rather only to satisfy my own curiosity about where this will all lead …

<blockquote>Comparing toes to freedom is what you would refer to as a category error.</blockquote>

I figured you’d say that. OK, substitute “mind” or “person” for “toes.” Toes, minds, persons, and freedom are quite different from each other, to be sure; but they are alike in that they are features of humans. Are your mind or your person eternal, so that when God cadged you into his world they came along with you, or did he add them to you when he urged you into his cosmic project? Apart from your freedom, what was it about you that has perdured eternally, so that it was indeed you that God herded into this world, and who is still in it? Not your toes, I gather. Nor anything about your body, for it is all tied up with intramundane factors like parents, history, Earth, the biosphere both now and all the way back, and so forth. None of that is eternal (is it?). So, nothing about your body could have been imported to the world by God. So were you a sort of ghost before God convinced you to be implanted in this world, and in your body? Is your body then something like a robotic vehicle or zombie that your spirit can inhabit and use to move around? If it is anything like that, what is the point of embodiment – and by extension of this extensive continuum – in the first place? Why not just a world of pure spirits?

<blockquote>… what is the nature of that created freedom? Would it be fair to say that it is determined freedom – that is, freedom determined by God? </blockquote>

No. If that were so, it wouldn’t be freedom in the first place, and we’d be robots with no inner lives or ability to act: fancy tools in God’s hands, no more intelligent or sensitive or actual than hammers. If God give freedom to us along with our nature and our being, then freedom is exactly what he gives us. He can’t give us freedom to do only what he has determined we shall do, because that would be like giving us bodies that are not bodies.

<blockquote>And the doctrine of free will? Doesn't it do little more than make man accountable for the evil in the world? </blockquote>

Well, if we are free, then our acts are truly ours, and we are accountable for them. Those three things come along together as a package deal: I can be accountable only for what I freely do. But each of us creatures is responsible for only the evils we ourselves introduce to the world.

<blockquote>Boiling down freedom to the choice between following God's law or rejecting it enslaves man to the necessity of choices externally imposed upon him, </blockquote>

Can you think of a choice that is *not* externally imposed upon you by history, the preferences that you find are natural to you and immutable (e.g., hating tomatoes or hip hop), your own past, and your immediate circumstances, including God? To put it another way, what good could you choose that is absolutely not of this world, or of any other, or of God? What choice could you make that was *absolutely untrammelled by anything outside yourself, including your own past*? If you had such a choice, what would be the point of it; what possible difference could it make?

Really our choices are all, wholly, and only about how we shall respond to external circumstances, given our past. That some such responses accord with God’s law and some do not is inescapable, so long as there is a God. If God is real, then either we agree with him or we don’t. I can’t see how this is a problem. It looks to me like the only way things could be, unless there is no God. I mean, it’s just the same among us. I.e., either my choices agree with you, or they don’t, or somewhere in between. Where’s the problem?

<blockquote>… all driven by the fear of eternal damnation and punishment.</blockquote>

Wait, what? Does Romantic Christianity teach also that there is no damnation or punishment for sin? I had not heard that.

I mean, I can see how that might be the case, if all the actual beings of this world were eternal, and had been recruited to it by God: whenever they felt like it, they could check out of the world again and go back to whatever they had been doing before, no problem, no cost. Sort of like if I murdered a guy, and when the judge sentenced me to death I could just say, “Nah, don’t wanna,” and walked out of town a free man.

<blockquote>Because if God created absolutely everything that exists, then the desire to resist God must ultimately have been created by God Himself – as must all evil. </blockquote>

Not quite. God created all things good, including good things that are free to do otherwise than what he would have liked them to do.

bruce g charlton

9/4/2024 09:14:34

The question of freedom/ agency/ "free will" was one that I thought I had answered to my satisfaction in the "God created/ bestowed it" semi-mystical fashion in my early years as a Christian.

It was a few persistent and probing questions in comments from WJ Tychonievich that nagged at me, until I realized I hadn't *really* considered what fee will was, and how it could possibly work. I didn't really understand what I was saying.

In the end (I think it's the end!) I concluded that if free will was real, it was an essentially "godlike" attribute, something that must come from the defining essence of each being with free will. And that this meant that Men are, in this respect, not just God-like, but of the same nature as God.

This, of course, fitted with Mormon theology - but I hadn't realized before. I'm pretty sure that this was an insight of Joseph Smith (along with others about the relationship of God and Men) - but I don't think he himself ever explained it as such and specifically - he wasn't a philosopher.

I later realized that what applied to Men must apply to all of creation.

It was Steiner and Barfield (and Coleridge) that clarified that freedom was primarily of thought and in the spirit realm (not action, not material - these are secondary and optional), and that it was part of the nature of being.

Anyway - my point is that it was a difficult and prolonged business to get clear the nature of freedom - but when I got there I found it was simple enough for a child to understand. Indeed, I think it is the spontaneous and innate understanding with which we began as young children, and was apparently retained by the remaining first contact era hunter gatherer tribes.

But getting to this simplicity and clarity required (as you know) a complete metaphysical overhaul, and rejection of many standard philosophical theological assumptions.

9/6/2024 21:10:42

@ Kristor - Which is greater? Me using the freedom God gave me to align with Him, or me using the freedom God did not give me to align with Him?

9/7/2024 22:42:28

If the freedom God gives you is true freedom (as opposed to the specious "freedom" you have suggested it is), then there is no difference in the greatness of the two alternatives. If the only true freedom is uncreate freedom, then uncreate freedom is obviously better than the created specious "freedom."

This question and answer of course beg the question whether created freedom is really freedom, or not. You have argued that it is not, but your arguments all seem to me to boil down to a restatement in different words of the proposition that uncreated freedom is the only real sort.

Finally: if our freedom is uncreated on account of the fact that we, and the angels and demons, and perhaps sundry other spirits, are all like God eternal gods, then why would it be greater to align with God than with Satan or Sorath or Moloch? I mean, if we are all coeternal gods, who cares what YHWH says? Why care what he says? He's just one guy among billions; who says his notions are better than yours or mine or Sorath's? If all our coeternal divine notions are alike in dignity and value, why pledge our allegiance to any of them? If they are not, then by what objective standard are they not, and who set that standard, and by what power?

9/8/2024 09:47:23

@ Kristor - Why pledge allegiance with God over Satan, Sorath, etc.?

Love.

None of the other co-eternals you cite above mastered their uncreated freedom to become wholly good and creative, and they don't desire that their followers use their uncreated freedom to become wholly good and creative. The co-eternals you cite do not seek love or friendship. They seek submission, worship, and domination.

God, our father, the creator, seeks something other. And what greater thing could there be than the aligment of a freedom he did not create with his own freedom through love? The sort of alignment that could yield true co-creativity?

9/9/2024 03:42:03

It’s an attractive vision. But it presupposes a like apprehension of the character of aesthetic value common among the eternal spirits prior to the inception of God’s cosmic project. The question then is, in the absence of any objective standard of aesthetic value, that was somewhat appealing and thus suasive to the population of eternal spirits, why would any eternal spirit not already involved with God’s project (as we both are) feel any attraction to it? The only way that could happen is if there were some prior objective standard of beauty and goodness, of aesthetic value, that such other spirits shared, so that God’s vision was really, truly beautiful, rather than only appealing and beautiful to him. Whence that objective standard of aesthetic value?

In short, why would eternal spirits value love, or creativity, or beauty, or any of the things we value as creatures participant in God’s creation?

The objective standard of aesthetic value under which God’s creative project is appealing to other isolate eternals looks prior to God. If it is, then that standard is the ultimate source of creation; is the First Principle; is what all men have always called God.

9/7/2024 22:28:27

Here's the end of my last big comment, which I suppose got cut off due to size limitations of Weebly:

<blockquote>Because if God created absolutely everything that exists, then the desire to resist God must ultimately have been created by God Himself – as must all evil. </blockquote>

Not quite. God created all things good, including good things that are free to do otherwise than what he would have liked them to do. The only way he could have avoided the option of free beings to choose evil would have been to refrain from creating free beings in the first place. He can’t create a free being that is not free any more than he can create a triangle with 4 sides.

Be that as it may, supposing that we free spirits are eternal, so that God has *nothing at all to do with the evil we do,* does not solve the Problem of Evil. As I pointed out above, all it does is make the Problem of Evil (seem to) go away, by eliminating the category of evil. It reduces our differences with God to differences of opinion, that have no moral valence whatever. If Satan and I are coeternal with God, then our two different sets of moral opinions about things are just as legitimate and suasive as his, and it becomes rather silly to treat any such opinions as good or bad.

But in that case, morality is a dead letter, through and through: there is no nomos, nor then any Lógos. The whole shooting match then makes no sense.

We find that the world is not like that.

<blockquote>Saying that God gave men Free Will does not answer this – because agency can only operate using the materials provided by God, which must mean that God made the evil in the first place, for evil to be choose-able.</blockquote>

Yeah. Plus God could have made 3 sided squares, if he wanted to.

You can’t have an option to do good unless you have options to do otherwise. If your only option is to do what God wants you to do, you are not free; i.e., you are not.

Well, OK, but why didn’t God limit us to good options?

We could ask, equivalently: Why didn’t God create only the positive integers, and leave those pesky irrational and negative numbers out of the picture? Or: Why didn’t God rule that π = 3, to make life simpler for us? But of course, once you’ve got the positive integers, you find eventually that the other sorts of numbers are implicit in them necessarily. Likewise, you soon find that π *cannot* be 3.

Again likewise, suboptimality is logically and necessarily implied by optimality.

<blockquote>There is much in traditional theology that is problematic. Much. And it has never been satisfactorily explained, mostly because of the insistence that freedom, like everything else, must come from God.</blockquote>

Traditional theology is certainly difficult, but it is just not true that it has not satisfactorily explained the Problem of Evil – and all the other worries that have perplexed people for ages. How do I know? Because – starting from a set of metaphysical commitments much like your own – I have plumbed the explanations, and they hold up.

<blockquote>Freedom is paramount and extends well beyond acting and being "to some extent free." </blockquote>

There is for finite beings in relations with each other no such thing as perfect, absolute, untrammelled freedom. Other beings constrain our choices, willy nilly. I can’t decide that I am not going to be the son of my father, or that my son is not my son, e.g. I can’t decide that you shall be a woman from now on. I can’t decide that I shall eat my cake and still have it, that murder is OK, or that I shall scribe a 4 sided triangle. Pertinently, I can’t decide that my acts in contravention of the divine will bear no ill consequences; that I can leap into a fathomless abyss without falling.

Beings like us, whose acts are inescapably constrained by historical, logical, and ontological facts we cannot change, are *necessarily* free only to a certain extent.

<blockquote>Freedom is spiritual essence.</blockquote>

Agreed. No freedom → no spirit → no life → no actuality. So, actuality hangs on freedom.

<blockquote>Concerning co-eternals, we are eternal after we die, are we not? </blockquote>

No. We are sempiternal: everlasting, immortal; we began and shall never end. What is eternal never begins, never ends, and – being timeless (this is just what “eternal” means) – is without succession or change.

<blockquote>Why is it so inconceivable to believe that we were eternal before we were born?</blockquote>

Well, partly because [we] are subject to succession and change. But also because it is not possible to complete an infinite series of finite moments, as [we] would have had to do in order to arrive at this present moment (or any other) if [we] had always been, and so, never came i

9/8/2024 16:32:27

@ Kristor - I see it this way. We were totally free but completely isolated spirits before God made us his children, meaning we had little self-awareness and could not utilize our inherent freedom to do or be all that much.

By making us his children and placing us in Creation, God grants us an environment in which we can exercise our latent, inherent uncreated freedom for good, primarily by willfully joining the ongoing process of Creation via alignment with his creative purposes and the nurturing of aligned, loving relationships.

On the one hand, in mortal life, we experience the freedom you discuss -- free will freedom, the freedom of choices between good and evil, moral choices, etc. You claim that it makes no difference if this freedom we experience is created or uncreated. I disagree. If freedom is just something God gave us, we had no choice in the matter. We are basically forced to be "free." However, if we our freedom is ours, something we brought into Creation, then our exercising of freedom takes on far more significant dimensions.

"Beings like us, whose acts are inescapably constrained by historical, logical, and ontological facts we cannot change, are *necessarily* free only to a certain extent."

Yes, that's true to a certain extent, but the recognition of uncreated freedom allows us to enter upon another order of being which is spiritual in character and goes beyond those things.

On the other hand, freedom is not merely about responding to externals via choices. This kind of freedom can actually lead to a form of slavery, especially when we become bogged down in nothing but externals. Freedom is also an inner quality that can help shape, influence, and form externals. Authentic freedom is not all exteriorization and responding to externals. Ultimately, I assume the overarching divine purpose of Creation is for beings to be free with God; that is, to align themselves with God's overarching purposes via their own uncreated freedom. To master uncreated freedom as God has mastered it. To align the uncreated with the created for the purpose of continued and ongoing creation.

They can offer God something he did not and could not create, something God can work with to further Creation.

Of course, very little of this holds any water if you hold traditional, classical assumptions, which is fine.

9/9/2024 04:27:59

"By making us his children and placing us in Creation …"

So God *forced* us into his Creation? How does that confer a better sort of freedom upon us than if he had given us our freedom along with our very being? Doesn’t it make him a sort of ontological tyrant, and us his slaves?

How does one eternal force another to do anything at all, in the first place?

If freedom is just something God gave us, we had no choice in the matter. We are basically forced to be 'free.'"

But didn’t God give us something when he forced us into his Creation, and forced us to be his children? If he gave those things to us by force, we had no choice in the matter. Etc.

I just can’t see why being given something absolutely unmerited and really terrific, and at no cost to ourselves – being, power, intelligence, freedom, and so forth – is so horrible and enslaving. What, exactly, is the *problem* with being granted freedom? How is that bad?

If I were king and conferred a fief upon you and ennobled you, well then you’d be a nobleman with an estate, willy nilly. Would that be bad? Most people would say, no. But perhaps noble wealth was not quite to your liking; maybe you didn’t much like the architecture of your manor house. You could then repudiate your nobility and your estate, if you wished (this is what sinners do when they sin). But the ability to do so would depend upon your prior possession of nobility and your fief. You can’t get rid of what you don’t have; you can’t have the freedom to dispose of something you don’t possess in the first place.

"… freedom is not merely about responding to externals via choices. … Freedom is also an inner quality that can help shape, influence, and form externals."

Responding to others via choices *just is* helping shape, influence and form others. There is no way to choose except to select from among options that are prior to the choice. Choices are always *about* others: the others that precede them, and the others that follow them. Choices furthermore depend upon a prevenient order (which they may or may not increase, or decrease). And choices always introduce novelty to the world; they make concrete something that was never before. In this sense, they are all creative.

It seems to me that in your emphasis on freedom absolutely untrammelled by the constraints of others, you tend toward idealization of solipsism. How do things arrive at communion, agreement, love, alignment, and so forth if all the choosers out there are paying no attention to each other?

It is perhaps telling that you refer to others as “externals.” I mean, yes, they are externals. But they are other *beings.* Are they not something other, more, and better than just our oppressors, that would only tend to enslave us?

The sky, the clouds and the birds constrain my choices. Hallelujah!

Perhaps the disagreement between us on this topic is due at bottom to our different conceptions of freedom. To me, being that is untrammelled by the constraints of others is just pointless, perfect, painful isolation, with no possibility of increase of beauty. I like being able to choose between beer, pie, and coffee … or all three. But for those options to be open to me, beer, pie and coffee must be out there to begin with, both constraining my choices *and making them possible.*

9/9/2024 04:39:40

@ Kristor - "So God *forced* us into his Creation? How does that confer a better sort of freedom upon us than if he had given us our freedom along with our very being? Doesn’t it make him a sort of ontological tyrant, and us his slaves?"

No, I don't believe God forced us into Creation. We consented.

9/9/2024 05:25:22

@ Kristor - Apparently, I haven't communicated what I mean by externals clearly. I will try to rectify that in a future post of its own.

9/9/2024 04:34:35

@ Kristor - For you, everything must come from God and be of God for Creation to make sense. I generally don't like to go over this in polonged comments because atheists have done this to death, and I am no atheist. Anyway, I'll touch on a few done to death arguments for which I know you already have perfectly coherent responses:

If God is wholly good, the first principle, omni-everything, and created everything from nothing, then everything in his Creation should be good. Full stop. To say that he creates everything wholly good but free and then allows the freedom he gave/instills/creates/whatever to mess up the goodness immediately disqualifies the freedom he grants as being good. Saying that he allows us the option to choose eternal damnation instead of the beatific vision is no explanation for his apparent goodness. It also immediately draws into question virtually all of his omni qualities. How can an apparently lowly creature like man so easily derail the good in God's wholly good Creation? If everything is from God, including freedom, then God created evil. Unless, of course, we consider evil as some category of subcreation. So, no, created freedom does not absolve God from responsibility for evil. If good is wholly good and all-powerful, he could have logically created a different set of circumstances than the ones we experience.

For God to be wholly good, he must be absolved from creating bad. Uncreated freedom via the inherent agency of already existing beings that God created into his cosmos achieves this, but that comes at the price of limiting God's omniness and power. Thus, God's motivations for creating already existing beings into Creation are wholly good, but he knows the beings themselves are capable of choosing evil of their own accord and going against his purposes, yet he is willing to take the risk in the hope that beings will use their uncreated freedom to align freely with him and his purposes.

I could go on, but I'll go back to the main and simple premise. Despite what you claim, the freedom inherent in a free agent cannot be created from nothing. This is God's square circle. Freedom is itself an uncaused cause -- hence, uncreatable. God can perhaps shape and form that freedom, but he cannot logically create it from nothing. Referring to some Aristotelian logic strand about actuality via Aquinas does not adequately answer this.

And about the if God is not supreme, not omni, not everything why would I worship him argument, doesn't this reveal more about the mindset of the worshipper than about God? If God is wholly good, isn't that enough? Isn't it enough to want to align yourself with a being like that?

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Created Freedom Cannot Be True Freedom

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