Choosing the future

According to the typical Arminian, you can’t make a real choice unless the future is open-ended. And since they think people do make real choices–as they define it–they think the future is open-ended.

But what about the future? Men make plans for the future. What will I do tomorrow? Or next week? Or next year?

That involves making short-term or long-term choice’s about the future. Resolving on what you’re going to do.

Long-term plans involve shot-terms plans. You choose to do something on Friday. In order to do that, there may also be something you need to do on Thursday. Take wedding plans, in involve a series of preliminary events leading up to the grand event. Preparations.

But there’s a catch. All of us are mortal. Our earthly future will come to an end. Yet most of us don’t know when we will die. As a result, most of us end up making premortem plans for the postmorem future. Plans for a future in which they’re dead. All the things they’re going to do, which–due to the little mishap of death–they will never do. Never have a chance to do.

As a result, most of us make plans for a closed future. Even if you’re a libertarian, the future is only-ended to you as long as you exist in the future. Once you die, your future slams shut. There is still a future, but it doesn’t include you. It doesn’t include your choices. Yet that doesn’t prevent you from making plans for a closed future.

(From a Christian standpoint, you have a future in the afterlife. But I’m discussing plans we make about what we’ll do in this life–and not the world to come.)

Take James Dean. Dean was one of those Hollywood celebrities who died young. He died on September 30, 1955–at the tender age of 24.

Yet Dean surely had plans that extended beyond September 30, 1955. I assume he expected to go to bed that night and wake up the next morning. I assumed he was planning to do something with his time on October 1, 1955.

In his shortsighted outlook, he still had his entire life ahead of him. Decades to pencil in. So many choices! So many opportunities!

For example, Dean intended to play Billy the Kid in The Left Handed Gun. After he died, the part went to Paul Newman.

Soldiers do this all the time. They write letters home, discussing what they plan to do with their life once they return home. Write love letters to their sweetheart. That’s what keeps them going from day to day. The prospect of what they’ll do when they get back home.

Yet, sad to say, some of them, many of them, die on a foreign battlefield. And they know, at the time they write, that they may not live to write another letter–much less live to marry their sweetheart and start a family.

So most all of us make plans that overshoot the mark. We plan for a future which will never be. And that’s true for libertarians. What is more, libertarians knowing plan for a future which will never come to pass. Knowingly plan for a closed future.

Libertarians are mortal. They know that sooner or later they will die. Most of them don’t know when the will die. They don’t know the day or the week or the month. Yet this doesn’t prevent them from planning for tomorrow, next week, next month, next year. They plan for a closed future just as if it were an open future. Exactly the same mental deliberations. The same psychological process. Even though they know full well that sooner or later, the future they plan for is a closed future.

Are libertarians fooling themselves? Are they self-deluded?