Perbandingan Konsep Teodise John Calvin dan C. S. Lewis serta Relevansinya terhadap Sikap Fatalistik dalam Menghadapi Covid-19

The world is currently enduring an epidemic of COVID-19 which causes suffering and pain. Facing the COVID-19 pandemic, Indonesian people have shown various responses. One pupular respond is theological fatalism, which believe that God has determined everything so that human efforts and actions are not necessary. In connection to this, the question arouse whether Christian theology, especially Christian theodicy, which was represented in this paper by John Calvin and C. S. Lewis, fell into fatalism? To answer this question, the writer would compare of the two theodicies by using a literature research. Through this research, it was concluded that neither John Calvin's theodicy nor C. S Lewis's had fallen into theological fatalism. Both emphasized free will and human responsibility in making choices and actions. The right attitude is to submit to the authority of God's word which commands us to act by doing good to others who are suffering and sick.Abstrak. Dunia saat ini sedang dilanda wabah penyakit COVID-19 yang menyebabkan penderitaan dan kesakitan. Berhadapan dengan pandemi COVID-19, manusia Indonesia menunjukkan berbagai respon. Salah satu yang umum adalah fatalisme teologis yakni kepercayaan bahwa Allah sudah menetapkan segala sesuatu sehingga usaha dan perbuatan manusia tidak membuat perbedaan dan dampak di dalam sejarah kehidupan. Berkaitan dengan hal tersebut muncul pertanyaan apakah teologi Kristen, khususnya teodise Kristen, yang diwakili di dalam paper ini oleh John Calvin dan C. S. Lewis jatuh ke dalam fatalisme? Untuk menjawab pertanyaan tersebut penulis akan membandingkan kedua teodise tersebut dengan menggunakan studi pustaka. Melalui penelitian tersebut disimpulkan bahwa baik teodise John Calvin maupun C. S Lewis tidak jatuh ke dalam fatalisme teologis. Kedua-duanya sama-sama menekankan kehendak bebas dan tanggung jawab manusia di dalam melakukan pilihan dan tindakan. Sikap yang tepat adalah tunduk kepada otoritas firman Tuhan yang memerintahkan kita untuk bertindak dengan berbuat baik kepada sesama yang menderita dan sakit.

FATALISM: CONTRIBUTION OF WILLIAM OF OCKHAM

Fatalism is the ideology in which man is unable to do anything other than his own control and prevent any opinion, action or dislike. It also includes the fact that man is incapable of creating or preventing any event related to the future. There were several forms in fatalism. According to logical fatalism, such things are accepted as truth only if the future events of the present have already been decided. According to theological fatalism, free will does not mean that God has a foreknowledge of future events. Fatalism is one of the famous philosophical problems. Aristotle's interpretation of this has created a fatal mixture of theological teachings. This incompatible teaching was invented by Ockham. According to Aristotle, the omniscience and foreknowledge of God and the basic theological teachings have subtly challenged but some medieval philosophers have used those teachings without realizing it. As the first philosopher who criticized Aristotle in the Medieval Period, Ockham correctly interpreted the theological teachings. In contemporary philosophy, Ockham’s teachings are highly regarded. The purpose of this paper is to identify the confusions of Aristotle's teachings and to analyze Ockham’s interpretations. For this purpose, I have used the works of Aristotle and Ockham on fatalism as well as other sources which discuss and analyze the nature of logical fatalism as well as theology and how it affects theological teachings.

Edwards on the Incompatibility of Divine Foreknowledge and Human Free Will

In the book “Freedom of the Will”, Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) put forward a strong ar-gument for theological fatalism. This argument, I suppose, can be considered as the universal basis for discussion between Fatalists and Anti-Fatalists in the 20th century, especially in the context of the most powerful argument for fatalism, introduced by Nelson Pike. The argument of Edwards rests upon the following principles: (a) if something has been the case in the past, it has been the case necessarily (Necessity of the past); (b) if God knows something (say A), it is not the case that ~A is possible (Infallibility of God`s knowledge). Hence, Edwards infers that if God had foreknowledge that A, then A is necessary, and it is not the case that someone could voluntarily choose ~A. The article argues that (i) the Edwards` inference Kgp → □p rests upon the modal fallacy; (ii) the inference „God had a knowledge that p will happen, therefore „God had a knowledge that p will happen” is the proposition about the past, and hence, the necessarily true proposition“ is ambiguous; thus, it is not the case that this proposition necessarily entails the impossibility of ~p; (iii) it is not the case that p, being known by God, turns out to be necessary. Thus, we can avoid the inference of Edwards that if Kgp is a fact of the past, then we cannot freely choose ~p. It has also been shown that the main provisions of the argument of Edwards remain significant in the context of contemporary debates about free will and foreknowledge (Theories of soft facts, Anti-Ockhamism, theories of temporal modal asymmetry, „Timeless solution”). Additionally, I introduce a new challenge for fatalism – argument from Brouwerian axiom.

Reconstruction of the Stagirite argument against the fatalism of future events

The question of free will and determinism is one of the most discussed in analytic philosophy. This is because interdisciplinary research has entered the field of studying the brain and consciousness – and often, consciousness is presented as an invention, an epiphenomenon. One of the attributes of consciousness is free will. The prehistory of modern research in the field of free will is the discussion about the need for future events, which was first analyzed by Stagirite in chapter 9, "On Interpretation". Despite all the analyticity and consistency of Aristotle's works, this work is full of gaps in argumentation and formulations ambiguity. In this regard, over two thousand years, philosophers have described many reconstructions in this chapter's argumentation and interpretations. Conventionally, the question of fatalism can be divided into two intersecting directions: logical fatalism and theological fatalism. This article examines the first direction and will relate to the understanding of fatalism and arguments against it in the context of the development of logic and theory of argumentation in the 20th century. The first logician who radically revised the foundations of logic to build an argument against future events' fatalism was Jan Lukasiewicz. We can say that all his life Lukasiewicz fought against determinism and tried to find a logical basis for human freedom of will. However, the main discussion on this issue took place in the middle of the 20th century between the logicians whose work will be considered in this article: Linsky Leonard, Butler Ronald, Storrs McCall, and others. The discussion was conducted around understanding such philosophical concepts and their ontological status: time, truth, a necessity. Also, in the wake of Lukasiewicz, they clarified such logical concepts as bivalence and the law of the excluded third. Of particular interest was the emergence of logical modalities, true/false, which can change their meaning over time, which led to the emergence of new informal logic.

The Religion-Environment (Climate Change) Connection

Following Lynn White’s thesis of 1967 which indicted some Christian values for the current ecological crisis, many studies have been conducted on the connection between religion and environment/ecological crisis. These studies have sought to know whether religious beliefs and values influence environmental/climate change perceptions of people. However, while these studies have been geographically biased, their results have remained inconclusive. This study therefore examined this age-long debate with evidence from Nigeria. The study involved 30 church leaders drawn from Catholic, Anglican and Pentecostal churches in five geographical zones in Nigeria. The data was analyzed using descriptive analytical method. Findings show that religious values/schemas in forms of Eschatological/End-Time beliefs, Dominion beliefs, Theological fatalism, Pessimism etc. influenced climate change perceptions among the church leaders. The study also found that religious affiliation and theology mattered with respect to the influence of some religious beliefs. The implications of findings for the research on religion-environmental/climate change connection are discussed.

Ockhamism

Ockhamism, so named because it was developed and defended by the fourteenth-century philosopher William of Ockham, is a long-enduring response to fatalist arguments. Fatalism, the thesis that it is impossible for anyone to act freely, comes in two varieties: logical and theological. Logical fatalists begin their argument with the assumption that no matter what anyone does, it has always been true that she does it, while theological fatalists begin by assuming that no matter what anyone does, God has always known that she does it. Fatalists go on to argue that, since no one can change what has always been true or what God has always known, no agent can ever do anything other than what she does; hence, no agent ever acts freely. The Ockhamist response, in brief, is that arguments for fatalism trade on a failure to distinguish between changing the past, on the one hand, and its being up to an agent what the past was like, on the other. Once the relevant distinction is drawn, Ockhamists contend, it is clear that fatalist arguments are unsound. Though Ockham himself was primarily concerned with theological fatalism, his argument may just as well be formulated as a response to logical fatalism. It should be noted that there are many formulations of Ockhamism, just as there are many formulations of the fatalist argument.