Systematic Theology (Volume 2 of 3)Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Religion
Systematic Theology (Volume 2 of 3)
Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Baptists -- Doctrines; Theology, Doctrinal
Will, with no remaining power of contrary choice, may be brute
will, but it is not free will. We therefore deny the relevancy of
Herbert Spencer’s argument, in his Data of Ethics, and in his
Psychology, 2:503—“Psychical changes either conform to law, or
they do not. If they do not conform to law, no science of
Psychology is possible. If they do conform to law, there cannot be
any such thing as free will.” Spinoza also, in his Ethics, holds
that the stone, as it falls, would if it were conscious think
itself free, and with as much justice as man; for it is doing that
to which its constitution leads it; but no more can be said for
him. Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, xiii—“To try to
collect the ‘data of ethics’ when there is no recognition of man
as a personal agent, capable of freely originating the conduct and
the states of will for which he is morally responsible, is labor
lost.” Fisher, chapter on the Personality of God, in Grounds of
Theistic and Christian Belief—“Self-determination, as the very
term signifies, is attended with an irresistible conviction that
the direction of the will is self-imparted.... That the will is
free, that is, not constrained by causes exterior, which is
_fatalism_—and not a mere spontaneity, confined to one path by a
force acting from within, which is _determinism_—is immediately
evident to every unsophisticated mind. We can initiate action by
an efficiency which is neither irresistibly controlled by motives,
nor determined, without any capacity of alternative action, by a
proneness inherent in its nature.... Motives have an _influence_,
but influence is not to be confounded with _causal_ efficiency.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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