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Okay, I have a few minutes so let’s jump in.

If I were to characterize the matter you noted coming out of my post (to which you object), I would say you are suggesting that the Bible teaches “free will” rather than “divine determinism”. It seems that you allow authority to the Scriptures and thus are seeking to represent what it teaches rather than just one opinion vs. another.

You certainly correctly noticed that I am on the side of “divine determinism”. To clarify, I should say I believe the Bible is on the side of “divine determinism” and I wish to side with the Bible. If it is not what the Bible represents, then I wish to change.

But, first, to insure that we are not sliding by one another, could you define what you mean by “free will”? That is, your view seems to comport with CS Lewis’ view and he understood “free will” to be something close to the unaided, un-effected capacity of all men to make a decision without being manipulated or managed by God in any way.

Notice, this is not “un-affected”, which means God can still exert great pressure upon a man from the outside, but “un-effected” meaning that God does not reach inside a man and move his heart to do this or that. Nothing, according to Lewis, accomplishes a man’s decisions except that man’s own “chooser”.

Lewis recognized coercion or brainwashing as realities, but said they did not mitigate “free will”. Ultimately, the victim simply realized the utility in acquiescing to the perpetrator’s pressure…by his “free will”. In any event, according to Lewis, the only internal factors which move a man to decide something (whether to sin, to love someone, to turn to Christ, etc.) are those which belong to the man, alone.

Early in his books, The Problem with Pain and Mere Christianity, Lewis alludes to why the doctrine of free will is “necessarily true”: A world in which free will did not exist would render wrong actions impossible. That is, if God is good, and everything done simply expressed God’s will (that is, He was managing it to be done) then everything done would have to be by definition good. Since it is patently obvious that everything in this world is NOT good, he argued something other than God must have caused all the things which went astray. Those “other things” must be beings in rebellion, beings free from God. This, he says, is common sense.

Lewis goes on to notice God calls men everywhere to repent. Here he does refer to directly to the Bible and not just common sense. He argues such a call would be meaningless if men were being driven by God to sin and were not free to obey or refuse. Such, “…freedom of the creature must mean freedom to choose;…“.

There is a related argument I have heard from folks other than Lewis: Why would God ask us to do anything (obey, trust, follow, love, pray etc.) if it were not possible for us to do it in and of our own free will. Lewis didn’t say it exactly this way, but he implied it throughout his writings. This kind of thinking drives most people to say, “Of course free will exists.”

In Mere Christianity Lewis continues to argue that logically since God’s desire is for us to love Him, love extracted from a creature simply compelled to love back would be neither desirable, nor real love. Such a situation would, according to Lewis, be nothing short of a sick form of manipulation. God, he says, is not like that. Instead, the very nature of God is opposed to such control & manipulation.

Lewis points out that God is the ultimate, loving, “food” for mankind, the only true food the universe has to offer. God wants us to seek Him and by Him live. But, while God calls us repeatedly, we by our own volition alone disassociate ourselves from Him. While God continuously offers us Himself, we continuously refuse and use our free will to instead “…become very bad.” The result is a sort of spiritual starvation, a sickness of every man.

But he continues. According to Lewis, every man actually knows that he is sick with this starvation. Man intuitively senses failure before God but compounds his guilt with an extra effort to mask the awareness. Lewis claims that even the ancient pagan rites and Epicurean philosophy strained to eliminate the guilt and fear of punishment that every man knows is due from God. We are broken by our own choice, we know it, we hate the thought, so we hide from it. Lewis believes man is ultimately and only responsible for this situation…sort of.

He also saw modern society making matters worse. Society, along with the professions of psychology/psychiatry, encourages us to deflect this correct self-perception. Between our bad thinking and these other folks, we have morphed clear understanding of guilt into simple nuisance. Rather than allowing our psyches to be informed with the shame and guilt we bear for willfully turning from God (and refusing to turn back to Him), we redefined our evil as “natural” behaviors/thoughts. We have now refashioned our feelings of guilt into impulses which should be expressed rather than suppressed or repressed. If there remains any thought of a god, it is that he is simply stodgy and angry all the time; a good reason to jettison thoughts of a god, altogether. And, in this we take yet another willful step away from our healing.

So, man is the real culprit for all of this evil and this is precisely why Lewis says that it cannot derive from God. God is not like this, He would not fight against Himself, He would not create such deranged thinking. No rational God would create a thing that He hates, then make it war against Himself and then set out to destroy it.

Sin, Lewis says, just could not possibly be the product of a God in whom there is no darkness. It must be from something that He does not control. He simply created just the opportunity for it go awry.

This is how I have understood those to hold the “free will” view to define the situation. But, I am interested in your definition. Please elaborate.