You haven't demonstrated that the language of deliberation, choice, and will is the province of LFW. Until you do, your challenge is premature. Get cracking!
hunh?
choice is the opposite of determination, you can't rationally argue that.
I think we've found the problem. You're unreasonable.
![Tongue :P](https://www.reasonablefaith.org/forums/Smileys/default/tongue.gif)
I use the language of determinism and so do you! You speak of being influenced by desires and reasons and beliefs, of inspecting options (deliberating), of having a character which determines your predispositions, and of being a slave to sin. That's the language of determinism.
what??
influence and determine are entirely different things, clearly this can not be argued.
influence
1.
the capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behavior of someone or something, or the effect itself.
determine
1.
cause (something) to occur in a particular way; be the decisive factor in.
--
Seem pretty similar to me. Maybe the problem is your dictionary.
It's also the language of LFW, as free will doesn't actually enter into the question of resolving uncertainty in favor of certain outcomes, except as a fanciful reduction which nobody seems capable of specifying. You have free will, it just doesn't affect your decisions. Ah, gotcha.
what?
The ability to freely choose is a well understood notion, it's the opposite of being determined (again, this is pretty basic stuff, see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/
What provides for that ability to choose is the immaterial soul.
Right. And the immaterial soul is a well understood notion.
That our actions are sensible to ourselves is the greatest testimony to determinism that there is. Otherwise I should be continually amazed that there is any sense to my decisions at all.
On determinism EVERY thought and action is determined, including the thought that actions are sensible. Your drifting into talking as if you have the ability to freely choose..
It's what those thoughts that actions are determined by which determines whether they appear sensible or not. If I was just 'determined' to think certain things sensible and others not, my behavior would be wholly inexplicable to others. It's the fact that others can tell a causal story about the reasons and beliefs I have, and how those determine my actions which provides the common foundation for understanding another person's actions. If people just have different souls, possessed of different wills, why do we look for the proximal causes of someone's behavior at all? The vicissitudes of your free will were determined at ensoulment, a process that I am completely oblivious to -- why should your actions make any sense to me at all?
You keep declaring words as off-limits to the determinist that aren't in fact outside the scope of a deterministic understanding of human behavior. As long as this conversation revolves around a he said, she said view of the semantics, it's going nowhere fast.