Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

I have blogged on an (impossible) experiment which could decisively disprove libertarian free will. But even the opposite results yielded by the experiment would scarcely give a libertarian any comfort, because the divergent results among the initially identical actual worlds may be due to genuine and totally unpredictable random events influencing our bodies and even [...]

Eller admits that relativism, understood as the claim that “all judgments and values come from some particular point of view,” is a “danger,” because “this awareness is inimical to believing in your own man-made environment: if we know that we just made it up ourselves, it has no special or exclusive claim to our credulity [...]

Our author’s main point is that immersion into the study of anthropology leads one to accept cultural relativism, and that, in turn, makes one into a freethinker. In what follows I will try to discern the connections, if any, between these three things. Cultural relativism, in Eller’s understanding, “does not maintain that ‘anything goes’ but [...]

I’d like to suggest that free-will libertarianism considers the agent, the self making the choices to be an irreducible ultimate given. On the other hand, it seems compatible with libertarianism to hold that the choice is still determined in the sense that if agent P were put in circumstances C, where C is a set [...]

I want to throw it out as a possibility that in heaven the blessed do not make choices, because there is only one good, namely, God Himself, and He perfectly satisfies every desire. The saints are not capable of not choosing God, because they are “closed up”; they are confirmed in goodness. We might also [...]

I have indicated what I mean by transcendentals here. However, I failed to realize at that time that the 4 transcendentals, though they indeed correspond to the 4 temperaments, do not nevertheless take their character from the 4 moral virtues. Instead, they are aspects of wisdom. In fact, all three of the intellectual virtues — [...]

We can distinguish four kinds of moral perfection: of obedience: legal, perfect obedience to (a) God’s will or (b) the law, either natural or divine; of being: virtuous character, sharp identity, nothing about oneself which one hates or is ashamed of; of deeds: works of mercy, successful entrepreneurship; of becoming: having no obstacles to one’s [...]

If charity is gone, then faith ceases to be practical, that is, supplying the means to the end of reaching salvation and God and becomes a purely speculative and scientific object of knowledge: if I loved God or if I wanted to be saved, then that’s what I would have to do, according to the [...]

I am redating and updating this post. Here is part I. Suppose that a person reads the Gospel and comes to believe what it says. Can he do so of his own natural power? The answer is yes, but this belief will be a mere opinion. Grace is still needed to turn that opinion into [...]

His view is that had Adam persevered in righteousness and remained obedient to God (in every way, including not eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil), then he and Eve and, presumably, their descendants would have earned instant glory, which amounts to “infallible, moral excellence, and inalienable blessedness,” after [...]

The absurdity of this question should be immediately perceived after reading this post, where the relevant argument is that “our nature is created for the sake of our virtues (a truth manifested in the move from the beginning to the proficient state), and our virtues are attained for the sake of happiness (the move from [...]