When I was 4, my family moved into Anderson Cottage, here on the campus of the college where I now work. We only lived there for a year, but some of my earliest memories were of that house. When I moved back to take this job, Anderson Cottage was still there.

Now it's gone. They bulldozed the whole thing recently.

To be fair, the house was old when we first moved in (more than 25 years ago), and it was looking pretty bad by the time they bulldozed it, so it's not like the bulldozing was premature. On top of that, they started tearing some parts of it out by hand a few days before they bulldozed it, so I took the opportunity one evening to poke around, reminisce, and say my good-byes.

Here's how the house looked in March 2007, when I last took pictures of it:



Here's how it looks now:



From another angle, before and after:





Goodbye, Anderson Cottage.

This weekend I read Jonathan Edwards's Freedom of the Will. It's a bit . . . dense. As far as I can tell, his argument goes thusly:

1. Every action we take is based on a Motive - what we consider will bring us the greatest good.
2. One cannot Will a change in Motive - for what would be the motive for that will?
3. At the end, one finally comes down to Motive as Nature or Personality.
4. Arminians assert that Free Will demands that Will be able to choose good or evil from an unbiased and indifferent position.
5. But God is praised for His goodness, which He is infinitely biased towards.
6. Ergo, one Wills good only because one is good; an evil person does not will to be good; it does not please him.
7. God decides sovereignly to regenerate an evil person so that he can will good (by making him good).
8. For a Calvinist, "Free Will" means "free to act in accordance with our natures - free to choose what we believe will please us most."

All of which, of course, makes perfectly logical sense, but can in no wise explain how unfallen angels and Adam & Eve could will to do evil.