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driving him to confess his crime to the police as well as pressuring him to accept religion. Not only does she comfort and provide Raskolnikov with a shoulder to cry on, Sonia also exemplifies within the work various central themes. Themes such as “free-will,” “poverty,” and “family” are all epitomized…

Destiny Cat’s Cradle doesn’t only cast doubt on the usefulness or wisdom of searching for truths, but also the ability of a person to control their own destiny is questioned. Do we create our own meaning or are we just following a path already laid out for us? It seems Vonnegut thinks life is meaningless and that there isn’t a God that sets a path for us to follow. Destiny is not controlled by someone or something more powerful than us but by what the generations before us has provided. “To…

The struggle between certainty and doubt is the ultimate choice and feeling you have on a decision, yourself, or others. The choice is not so finite; it could lay anywhere in between the two. The perspectives of William Lyon Phelps and Bertrand Russell are antithetical to each other, but their views are on differing topics as well. Phelps implies that you must have certainty in yourself in order to complete and defeat any task in the way. On the other hand, Russell mentions that the views or…

For years theodicy has perplexed believers and non-believer of Christ, theodicy is the issue(s) of evil in the world, and this issue is raised against the graceful authority of God. How could a divine Lord who is the regulator of all that is, and will ever be, allow evil to occur? There are many parables in the narrative that address this very problem (Prov 3:11-12, Job 19:26, Dan 12:2).Although the bible address this issue, it does not directly give a solution to the aforementioned. It seems…

“Part of the definition of libertarian free will that an action that is free in that sense cannot be caused by anything outside of the agent, not even God can cause a person to freely do what is right” (Tooley). If humans are thought to have free will, then God would have no ability to control their actions. This could result in evil being brought into the world due to negative actions being…

“Free will, without which no one can live rightly, is a good and divine gift.” (Augustine 65). In the book, On the Free Choice of the Will, Augustine argues that humanity’s will, which is given by God, is indeed free. As the book proclaims, free will is something that has the ability to produce righteousness and happiness; it is a gift that produces peace and prosperity. Yet, at the same time, there is the possibility of the will to be fixed on the all too enticing temptations of this world.…

each and every one of us in this world for a reason. He based us off a reflection of himself because he is perfect and almighty. We, as living Christians, have a story. The tools God gave us to follow his path are: vocation, evangelization, as well as free will.…

capacity for freewill. If he had not done so, a person would no longer carry his or her identity as a person. In response to the argument of God creating a free person who would always make the right decision, Hick argues that the contradiction in itself does not make sense despite the apparent logic. In order for something to be free it must be free of any causation by an outside source. There cannot be any choice out of reach or not allowed. There cannot be a guarantee that anything will…

Snowpiercer: Determinism and the Self-Serving Hero The frozen wasteland that once was earth is the reality of the world of Snowpiercer. The chemical known as CW7, claimed to be a solution to global warming and created/manufactured by humans, was what brought the frozen wasteland to fruition in the year 2014. That it was humanity that brought on the ice age on as an effort to reduce earth temperatures introduces the prevailing idea of determinism in the film: humans were so determined to ‘save’…

Is action free or determined, Spinoza argues that it is determined but there is a freedom of will in the doctrine of the conatus. This view rests on three metaphysical positions that Spinoza advocates for, namely immanent necessitarianism, reductive naturalism and monism. All that exists and has is and will happen is immanent and inevitably going to happen. This he argues is because nature is constructed by a free uncaused cause (that which has no external constraint). This uncaused cause…