I think a person making a choice with a big threat hanging over them is (1) potentially still making a real choice but (2) less able to make a real choice than someone without the big threat attached to their decision. It may or may not feel like there's less choice, on any given occasion.
Apparently you disagree; correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like your position is that any given choice-like-thing either is or isn't a real choice, with no scope for different degrees of real-choice-ness. That seems very odd to me; perhaps the oddness will be clearer if we consider some different sorts of context where choice might be impaired: habit, addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder, hypnosis, starvation.
I agree (of course!) that if sin inevitably means damnation, then it's good for the prospect of damnation to influence our choices. The points at issue are (1) whether it's reasonable for an allegedly supremely good and powerful god to set things up that way, (2) whether it's plausible that actually God didn't really have any choice but to set things up that way (there is a certain sort of recursive irony around about here...), (3) whether, given his decision to set things up that way, it would in fact have been better for us not to have the option of making the choices that would land us in eternal damnation, and perhaps (4) whether, given the decision to set things up that way and our option to make the choice either way, we ought to have been better informed about the consequences of our choices. My own best-guess answers are: no, no, dunno, yes.
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Date: 2008-05-29 12:47 am (UTC)Apparently you disagree; correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like your position is that any given choice-like-thing either is or isn't a real choice, with no scope for different degrees of real-choice-ness. That seems very odd to me; perhaps the oddness will be clearer if we consider some different sorts of context where choice might be impaired: habit, addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder, hypnosis, starvation.
I agree (of course!) that if sin inevitably means damnation, then it's good for the prospect of damnation to influence our choices. The points at issue are (1) whether it's reasonable for an allegedly supremely good and powerful god to set things up that way, (2) whether it's plausible that actually God didn't really have any choice but to set things up that way (there is a certain sort of recursive irony around about here...), (3) whether, given his decision to set things up that way, it would in fact have been better for us not to have the option of making the choices that would land us in eternal damnation, and perhaps (4) whether, given the decision to set things up that way and our option to make the choice either way, we ought to have been better informed about the consequences of our choices. My own best-guess answers are: no, no, dunno, yes.