re. free will

The reason only Christians historically have REALLY believed in free will (though certainly not all of them have - ex. Calvinism), esp. if you go back to the early Greek language writings of the various "Church Fathers", was because they believed in creation ex nihilio.

This means, whatever exists besides God (whether that be Heaven, lesser spiritual planes, "angelic" beings, material existence, man, animals, rocks etc.) can be summed up as "created." Compared to God they are all the same, and He utterly different from them. And where as He simply "is" ("I Am, that I Am" like it says in the third chapter of Exodus), we "are" from "nothing." This is the meaning of the phrase that the "world rests in God's hand" - it's the idea that creation is being upheld by His "power" alone, that it has no existence besides this. God exists, creation has existence (from God.)

So, while that makes all things related to Him in the sense of an integral dependency, it also means they are all utterly unlike Him and in fact are NOT Him. That's the key, and that's where all pre-Christian, pre-Judaic "philosophies" and even mythologies went wrong - they imagined the substance of the Divine and the substance of the manifest universe to be identical. Hence, why ancient creation stories from other cultures (besides the Israelites) often began with the "birth of the Gods" from the same generic and eternal "stuff" which the universe is made of. In the Egyptian creation stories, you'll find the basic idea of the Gods emerging from an eternal abyss of dark waters. It is that chaotic abyss which is really "divine", and everything else is simply a form of it.

The God of the Jewish mythos, however, is different than creation. This is why, while Genesis chapter 1 uses the exact same themes as their pagan neighbours, there are some very obvious key differences, telling differences. The biggest, is that it is very clear that there was a point where the "chaotic abyss" (called "the waters" in Genesis) did not exist. God created them too, they exist because He "said so." And He in turn energized the abyss, and gave it form (the laws of nature.) The universe is like God's plant, growing and flowering, but rooted in the soils of absolute "nothingness".

I go through all of this detail, because this seperation means that the created order does have freedom. While it will do nothing that is a surprise to God (for He is outside of time - that is a "law of nature", itself a created thing), how it grows has a great deal of indepndence - yet in the end, it is still the plant which God has seeded and grown out. It's certainly a paradox, but not to the point of being an utterly pointless assertion.

So in reality, if the Christian is asked "do you believe in free will?" he must answer "yes." And when he is asked "do you believe in predestination" he will also say "yes." The created order is like God in that it has freedom, but it is unlike God in that it's freedom is circumscribed/limited. For example, you and I really only have "free choice" properly speaking, not "free will" - it's not as if we can just "will" whatever we may want at a given moment to happen. God does it constantly, we never do - save virtually perhaps (in the mind - though even that has severe limits). Reality imposes itself upon us, we can only make a relatively narrow set of choices about how we deal with that. So it's kind of like "micro free will" if there can even possibly be a comparison between this and the utter freedom of God (Who just "is".)