The Miracle of Regeneration

October has been a pretty slow month for writing here, for which I apologize. There have been some extenuating circumstances, though I should have been better about it, especially considering all the fodder from my current readings.

At left is a new link to a friend's blog, written as he goes through the Bible from the beginning. He's only written a few articles, but there should be plenty more in the pipe if he gains steam.


One of my predispositions in studying the Scripture is to look at physical things as a manifestation of the spiritual. We read of a heavenly pattern for the tabernacle, for example (He 8.5), and of the heavenly Jerusalem (Ga 4.25,6). There are many other hints that we're justified in looking at physical things this way, of course; it's one of the purposes of types and the institution of the Mosaic Law.

We're accustomed to looking at miracles as a purely physical phenomena—so the turning of water into wine is a miracle because it circumvents the usual physical requirements for that sort of process. Raising Lazarus from the dead is a miracle, too, hopefully for obvious reasons.

But it seems to me that these miracles in the physical realm—the laws of physics being suspended or contravened—might also be shadows of less tangible miracles. In other words, it really does make sense to use the raising of Lazarus as an example of how we are regenerated because our own regeneration is itself a miracle.

If we can accept this—and I think it is reasonable—I think it is also reasonable to suggest that it is a miracle in a spiritually-similar way: regeneration contravenes a spiritual law. This at its core, I think, denies the (semi-) Pelagian notion that original sin did not irrevocably impair the human will. If regeneration violates some spiritual law, then it stands to reason that the human will should not be able to, any more than I can expect to generate enough lift to fly by flapping my arms.

More Free Will Musings

This collection of thoughts is mostly inspired by some recent stories regarding a link between faith and genetics. I found it originally on Slashdot and engaged in a short conversation with a couple posters regarding free will.

The original poster tried to demonstrate that God couldn't have free will because omniscience and omnipotence were logically incompatible. The premise and conclusion were both flawed, but it's really only the premise I'm interested in. He used a rather classic straw man argument: defining terms his way and applying them to the system of his choosing in order to show that system inconsistent. Christians never attributed free will to God in the sense that the poster would like to think of it.

The Bible is clear that (in at least one instance) God could not lie (He 6.8). All we really need in one instance to show that the poster's vision of God's omnipotence wasn't the same as the Christian's. And, for whatever it's worth, all Christians ever said was that we couldn't sin in heaven, not that we weren't free. The Scriptures really don't support the idea of free will as the power of contrary choice. They do a handy job of telling us that freedom is the ability to do what is right.


The original poster declined to respond, but another took issue with my statement that science provides no notion of free will either—it only ever ends in determinism (biological, chemical, and so on).

He used chaos theory, a new argument to me but not particularly to the debate. The mathematical basis isn't terribly difficult to grasp, and most people are familiar with the concepts regardless. The Butterfly Effect is the classic example: a butterfly flaps its wings in Venezuela and a tornado occurs in Texas. It's captured in the well-known rhyme:

For want of a nail, the shoe was lost;
For want of a shoe the horse was lost;
For want of a horse the rider was lost;
For want of a rider the battle was lost;
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.

Cutting out a fair amount of speculation and text, the thrust of it is that the present state of a chaotic system is very sensitive to initial conditions and that provided the same set of initial conditions, small variations along the way can produce drastically different outcomes after the same number of iterations.

This is important for a few reasons, one of which is that a lot of systems in nature are chaotic—the weather, for example, and the firings of neurons in the brain. What we find is that individual events are unpredictable, though classes of events are.¹

The poster admitted, however, that this really wasn't avoiding determinism at all, though it provided the perception of it through unpredictability. In fact, chaotic systems are deterministic, just not "orderly."

There's another problem here, and that is that "Joe Freewill" (the moral agent in his example) is under the same constraints I am: he can't predict his own choices, either. In other words, the person making decisions is as ignorant about them as I am.

Yet another issue is that while chaos theory describes it cannot impute. In other words, chaos theory can describe natural phenomena, but it cannot explain how they arise. Science doesn't answer those sort of questions, and indeed cannot. Chaos theory says, "Event A is unpredictable," but it doesn't tell me where the source of unpredictability is.


Lots of interesting things to think about and study here, and it will be interesting to read about if I can escape the mound of books I'm buried under. At the end of the day, though, science and math really don't provide humans with much humanity—at least not in this case.

Freedom and Junior High

If we are willing to believe that freedom is expressed in the power of contrary choice, we naturally run into a rather perplexing problem. In order to express our independence from the circumstances, we are driven to choose the worst of the choices to demonstrate that we may choose freely. (Our wills are otherwise constrained by the choices we have to make.)

There is a curious inversion here; the worst choice is suddenly the best because it expresses the ultimate good of freedom. But rather than expressing freedom, making Wrong Choices reduces it instead. We are no longer free, for example, to enjoy the consequences of our choices, unless we enjoy returning to our folly.

On Freedom

I spent a bit of Sunday after church talking to some newly minted friends at lunch. An imminent move put us in the uncomfortable position of saying hasty goodbyes, but good ones. The sermon topic was on Election, a doctrine they (and, I suppose, many other Christians) find somewhat disquieting. A fair description of the doctrine is in Wikipedia.

With scientists identifying neurons related to choice, and quite a lot said about Freedom and Liberty in the news these days, it doesn't seem bad to discuss it some. I think, actually, that the two concepts intersect.


The Bush Doctrine, for lack of a better term, essentially states that democracy (rule by the people) is the ultimate good. It is better, for example, than the sovereignty of nations. It's an international version of Free Will—which today means "the power of contrary choice."

The same definition of Free Will, just in a local sense, is what troubled my two friends at lunch. Self-determination, the power of contrary choice, Democracy in the collective sense. The trouble is that the definition of "free" has somehow become much different than I think it used to be. We think of a "free will" as one that is unconstrained by outside influence, little understanding that the consequences themselves influence the decision.

Freedom is not the power of choice nearly as much as it is the ability to be who you are. (In this respect, the regenerate are not nearly as free as the unregenerate.) And, perhaps more importantly, the ability to do what's right.

What has happened is that we have replaced this notion with the wrong one: that Choice is Right. We have pre-empted the idea of Right or Wrong Choices by simply saying that being able to Choose is the ultimate good, and that anything impeding choice (like, say, Physics?) is evil.

What we find is what Bush found: the ability to choose means very little without a good chooser (the Palestinians did, after all, elect a Hamas-led government).