Originally posted by RBerman
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Also, I'm not sure whether "control" is the best word to describe people acting according to their innate preferences and values, which they did not choose for themselves.
As for the rest, I agree that "having power to do X is not the same thing as doing X," but if we allow for passive determination, then God's comprehensive power over X seems equivalent to God's determining of X, whether that power is exercised actively or passively. God has purposed that everything be as it is, else it would be different.
Middle knowledge of future choices in an as-yet-unactualized-universe seems a curious thing to include in things "already" done. But I still haven't comprehended how middle knowledge ("If person, P, were in situation, S, then P would freely perform action, A (or P(S->A)).") even leaves LFW room to do anything.
(But keep in mind that I'm not insisting on Molinism.)
Originally posted by Joel
It seems that all those years of enslavement and the slaughtering of the babies is at least as evil (if not worse) than declining to let them go another few days. (or however long it was between plagues) We know that he did this prior evil and that the wages of sin is death and eternity in hell, right? So it seems difficult to suppose that he didn't deserve the punishment he got, or even worse.
But even if I'm wrong, and there was one string of times that "Pharaoh [but not God] hardened his heart" followed by a different string of times that "God [but not Pharaoh] hardened Pharaoh's heart," even then we only have the one final punishment after the whole string.
But your story of the dog does somehow remind me of the problem that heaven provides for LFW. If LFW is necessary for actions to have moral significance, and if LFW entails the possibility of sin, then either men in heaven have LFW, and there's a possibility that they will sin; or else men in heaven don't have LFW, and their eternal praise of God is of no moral significance. Either seems problematic.
Such a theory has other useful implications, such as answering the question of why didn't God just create everyone in that blessed state to begin with: i.e., that state necessarily entails the person freely choosing to become that kind of being. Then it would be logically contradictory to say that God creates a creature in that state to begin with.
Another possibility is to say that people in heaven can possibly sin, but don't. Perhaps analogous to saying that God in His omnipotence has power to do evil, but doesn't.
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