Like Acts 17:26-27?
He made also of one blood every nation of men, to dwell upon all the face of the earth — having ordained times before appointed, and the bounds of their dwellings –
to seek the Lord, if perhaps they did feel after Him and find, though, indeed, He is not far from each one of us… (YLT)
Which makes it even worse for your thesis that theologians like Augustine just rely on some “plain sense” of scripture for their insights into it. There may well be something that many of us today might agree on as being a sort of a plain sense to us, but even among us contemporaries such “common sense” is little more than shaky ground.
Well, I tried… to bring the conversation back to Calvinism. 
how so? augustine clearly uses 24 hours in confessions, and then goes metaphysical in city of god to reach the platonists
HOW DARE YOU!#!
Yeah good example. When looking for hard evidence, free will is not as obvious as the laws of nature but more subtle like that word “if” in the passage you quoted. In our personal experience, however, it is as obvious as the sun shining on our face. The only question is whether we play word games to hide from the light discounting that obvious experience and pretend that it is all darkness and night.
It is obvious that we have free will, and it is also obvious that God is absolutely sovereign. Superficially contradictory, we do not have the capacity to resolve it. But as the accounts of God’s miraculous providence, both in scripture by declaration and example and in the examples in the here and now, we know both are true. If we are his, we can embrace the apparent paradox, delighting in it and enjoying it. God is not called inscrutable for nothing.
My understanding is that Calvin held that Adam (pre-fall) had free will (and @Daniel_Fisher provided a quote about that, i.e. “man in his first condition”), but not that any regular humans or any of us today have free will. But I could be wrong on that, and would be interested in learning more about it.
The question is how does Calvin define free will. I wager he doesn’t define it as libertarian free will.
If so it would not be terribly far wrong even if it is a bit of an exaggeration. It is also tied up with the question of whether you think infants are born sinners. I certainly think that is wrong. By the time they learn to speak they have the memetic inheritance from Adam and a lot of bad habits of thought already that comes with it. We do have free will at birth, but by adopting the same self destructive habits of those around us we lose a lot of that free will. And at least when it comes to the question of salvation which Calvin was pretty narrowly focused upon, for all intents and purposes our free will is gone. Sin enslaves us to those self-destructive habits and makes it next to impossible to get rid of them. We cannot save ourselves. That is certainly true.
But free will is not ALL about sin and so we do experience free will in other aspects of life. Against sin (collectively at least) we find ourselves rather helpless. But in other things we do not. So we find ourselves in this predicament of technological revolution without sufficient moral strength not to turn those technological achievements to our own destruction – at least we seem to be on the knife edge in that respect. Thus we have the proverbial rope with which to hang ourselves. Perhaps it is God’s providence that this precarious situation might help to wake us up.
So the key is to bring up children without human parents, and all shall be well! I guess this also means that the younger a child is, the better behaved and more sinless the child is.
Ah, the we could all be noble savages, fallaciously so-called. 
Model child psychology must be right, then, that the only reason a child grows up to behave badly is due to their parents.
If someone has a quote handly, that’d be great. I just tried looking through Calvin’s Institutes, and he is quite a disorganized and tangent taking writer. Even worse than Augustine. He also likes to call everyone who disagrees with him stupid, although I can sympathize 
Ah so in your fantasy world before the fall, human children would be born with perfect behavior without having to learn a thing. LOL
What nonsense…
This all comes from this twisted definition of sin devised by those using religion as tool of power. I am hearing that intercom droning in the movie Priest “To go against the church is to go against God!”
Of course children have to learn. It not a problem because they have no power to do any harm yet. Yes the thing kids try when growing up are kind of random including sticking forks into electric sockets. This is NOT because they are born with a suicidal nature. Trying out every stupid thing that comes into their head is just part of the learning process. And yes they do have to learn to all kinds of good habits and regard for the well being of their fellow human beings, before they acquire the power to do harm to other people. But no, children are not born with self-destructive habits. These are learned. They do not come out of the womb as drug addicts, alcoholics, wife beaters, thieves, etc… etc…
Right, though libertarian free will can be so expansive as to be pretty useless for real-world situations where all will-ers are constrained by a bunch of things.
I think Calvin held that the one free choice made by a human (leaving Jesus out of it) was Adam’s decision to sin. And that one choice bound every human’s will (including Adam’s) to only be able to sin. But where I’m not so sure is that it also seems that even Adam’s choice was chosen by God in Calvin’s thinking. So I don’t really understand how Calvin held that Adam had a level of freedom pre-fall that we don’t have today, given that we all, in his view, desire to follow and do exactly follow the script God has written for us.
Exactly. This is Calvin’s doctrine of God two wills: the clear will and the secret will. By God’s clear will Adam made his own choice, God wants all of mankind to be saved, and so on. By God’s secret will, God wanted Adam to sin, God only wants to save some and ■■■■ others.
Not libertarian free will in the slightest. Human creatures in reality have no will of their own. They only have their own will as a figure of speech in Calvin’s view.
It’s too bad the parents teach them all these bad habits. If only we had humans that were not born of human parents to set our race on the right course.
Without FALLEN sinful human parents, yes. A lot of the memetic inheritance we have from Adam is also what makes us human. Or if that is too much to expect, to at least have the example of a new Adam to follow… that might work.
Quite correct, and an important distinction - Calvin typically contrasted “free will” with a will that in bondage to sin, and thus is no longer “free” to choose complete righteousness.
But of significance, note that Calvin believed that God had predestined the fall. So he was adamant that Adam had this capacity of “free will”, and in Adam’s case, that will was entirely uncorrupted by sin and thus entirely free from any internal corruption or weakness… but the simple fact that God had predestined Adam’s sin clearly did not, in Calvin’s mind, take away Adam’s free will. That is an important part of his thought to understand his basic “compatiblism” he held between predestination and free choice.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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