Showing posts with label A.W. Pink. Show all posts
Showing posts with label A.W. Pink. Show all posts

Monday, 21 October 2013

Calvin and Pink

As part of a discussion on Calvinism and free will, I read A.W. Pink's 1928 essay titled "God's Sovereignty and the Human Will". He defended three theses, one of which seems sensible and two that don't.

1. People's beliefs and actions have their cause in their nature and motivations (Pink gives his examples of motivations such as "the logic of reason, the voice of conscience, the impulse of the emotions, the whisper of the tempter, the power of the Holy Spirit"). I think his basic point is right. We don't make our choices in a vacuum. You choose to open your umbrella because you don't want to get wet. You choose to tell the truth because you believe it is the right thing to do (or perhaps don't because you're trying to avoid getting in some trouble).

2. People do not choose the good and they lack any ability to do so. This denies the common experience of the good things that people often do. The Calvinist response is to either deny that those things are actually good or else state that they are outwardly good but lack any good motivation. Both responses seem to assume their conclusion by appealing to the agent's apparently unobservable "true" nature and motivation.

3. People have no ability to choose the good and they are morally responsible for not choosing the good. This also seems clearly wrong. Consider an analogous situation where you discover that a small child is drowning and that there is no way to save him except by swimming out to him. However, you can't swim and so he drowns. Can you be morally responsible for not saving him?