This page is simply a compilation of the posts from my Free Will argument to date.
The reality of free will.
In modern culture either psychology or physics explains everything. So there is no room for real freedom. In many forms of orthodox, contemporary religion there is the belief that God chooses evil in order that good may come and that sin happens to be one form of that evil. So there is no room left for real freedom. Having real freedom is having the actual power to make self-denying choices. The issue is important because God has made that kind of real freedom both necessary and essential to real discipleship.
Then why do so many faithful and intelligent Christians define freedom as nothing more than the ability to do what a person wants to do? Or, supposing real freedom is actual, how could God be sovereign while human beings decide what becomes real?
Whether a free will is even possible or not is one question. Whether it ought to be taken as actual or not is another. Both questions ought to be resolved in a domain both philosophical and theological. I presume theism in the line of reasoning which leads me to believe in free will. So this argument is transparently, presumptuously, and deliberately theistic. In fact, it is most specifically Christian. But for the Christian what is important is not just what might be or what must be, but also what is (metaphysics), what ought to be (ethics), and what ought to be believed (epistemology and faith)–all in disciplines transformed completely either by belief in God or by the rejection of that belief.
The first post is below.
The conclusion of the opinion of the many posts upcoming (perhaps weekly) on this subject is this: the existence of a sovereign God implies the possibility of radically free will, and the possibility of such a will implies that it ought to be part of a Christian Worldview.
The argument toward that conclusion has four main components:
- the difficulties of believing in free will
- the difficulties of denying free will
- the possibility of there being free will
- the advantage of believing in free will
Each of those components has several, sometimes quite a few, sub-parts associated with it. So it will take some time for the whole argument to come together.
The first part of the first component is here:
1.1 A dilemma makes free will seem impossible.
The metaphysical problem with free will can be put forward fairly simply. It comes down to a dilemma horned on one side by a will with no freedom and on the other side by a freedom which has nothing to do with will.
As the argument goes (and it is a good one) nothing which can appropriately be called will can be without cause—and not just any cause, but one which must ultimately be both prior and sufficient. Everyone who thinks about it knows that there are things which happen prior to the will’s activity and are a part of bringing about what the will does. For instance, no one would pretend that any human’s will emerges untouched and unshaped by the influence of his parents or, on the other hand, by the influence of their absence. But the kind of cause required to explain why a will does what it does is not one that just influences the will, but one that is both prior to the will and sufficient to produce what the will does as well. Why does it need to be prior? Every other way of speaking of causes and effects involves the cause being prior to the effect. But when it comes to the human will, those who fancy human freedom like to speak of the will being explicable in terms of future purposes, rather than prior causes. That distinction is an element of what some have pejoratively called “folk psychology.” It is very odd indeed to say that something which is not yet actual (the result of a purpose) brings about an effect which is actual (the choice.) Joe might explain why he eats a grape by referring to its taste. Some might describe the taste he desires as the cause of his choice, but since the taste is not prior to the effect (the choice) it does not seem right to call it the cause of the choice he made. (Obviously, Aristotle’s way of describing causes takes this kind of “causation” into account. But that language is no longer suited to the way people describe the world, as the rest of this argument contends.) No, in fact (so the argument goes) that future experience could not have been the cause of his choice. Rather, his desire for that taste was the cause of his choice. And his desire is conveniently prior to his choice. Equally important, though, is that his desire (along with other prior causes) is sufficient to explain his activity.
Why does the prior cause of his choice need to be sufficient? Well, to put it bluntly, if any causal explanation is not sufficient to bring about the effect being studied, then there really has not been any explanation at all. Joe eats the grape. He says he ate the grape because he chose to. Under scrutiny, however, the freedom assumed in that statement of choice begins to falter. Under scrutiny, Joe admits that he chose to eat it because he desired its taste. And the further the inquiry goes, the less freedom appears to have been part of the picture from the outset. Why did he desire the taste? Because as a child his mother fed him grapes when he was lonely, and he was comforted. Whatever the answer, the point is that there is always an explanation for why a choice was made, a desire had, a psychological need or system of stimuli and responses established. Even when the explanation is unknown or misunderstood by either (or both) the actor and any investigator (such as a therapist) it still seems only reasonable to assert that there is an explanation, just that more experimentation or investigation is needed in order to find it.
To make the same point from a slightly different perspective: it may appear that Joe chose to eat the grape, and that the choice is free. But since he chose to eat the grape because of his desire for its taste, but did not choose to desire the taste, then his action really is not the result of his choice, but the result of whatever determined the psychology he has which desires that taste. Since the desire dictated his choice, whatever determined his desire is the real cause of his choice. And there is what the determinist sought—that which frustrates the intent of freedom. Whatever determined his desire is the prior, sufficient cause of his behavior. Any reference to choice or freedom is superfluous to what really happened. (By the way, this fact is what makes compatiblism useless. Compatiblism accomplishes nothing more than to allow a determinist to use the vocabulary of freedom and will—and to use it in the very domain where Occam’s razor would dictate that it be eliminated.) To close up the point: suppose someone admits Joe’s choice was dictated by prior, sufficient causes, but then asserts that he still could have done otherwise. Was he not still free to refrain from eating the grape? Suppose he did refrain. Surely the same line of explanation presented above would still apply. Joe desires the taste, but refrains from eating the grape. Then anyone investigating the question would have to assume that there is some explanation for why Joe did not eat the grape. Perhaps as a teenager he was rewarded in some other way for avoiding palatable treats. Regardless of the explanation, the assumption that with enough work and information, there is always an explanation (in terms of cause) for why people make their choices is an assumption that the will is determined rather than free.
So pervasive and powerful is the assumption that every event in the universe is explainable in terms of prior, sufficient causes that it seems only someone completely ignorant of basic physics could deny it. That being the case, why even present a dilemma? There is no potential for freedom at all. But quantum physicists and their often sycophantic followers assert that it may not be that simple. They point to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and quantum foam as evidence and they use probability theory to describe what they take as the fact that some physical events in the universe may be spontaneous—actually without prior sufficient cause. Subatomic particles swerve without explanation. Indeed, quantum matter appears to come into and out of existence with no explanation whatsoever. All of this indeterminacy in the physical world has led defenders of libertarian will finally to throw in their “aha!” “Aha!” they say. “There is room for something to act without prior sufficient cause.” But right there is where the other side of the dilemma strikes them.
Suppose libertarians somehow identify freedom of the will with indeterminacy in the physical universe. What good does it do them? It leaves them not with freedom, but randomness. This side of the original dilemma facing free will is that any indeterminate freedom appears to have nothing to do with will. If a person with a tic is asked why his mouth twitches, it is not surprising that he has no answer—or at least that any answer he gives has as little to do with freedom as it does with the will. In fact, his tic is more like motion than action, lacking the will which is characteristic of human action. But suppose Joe eats the grape (a legitimate action) and then honestly asserts that he had absolutely no reason for doing so. Assuming for the moment that he is not simply out of touch with his feelings, has he described the free act of a human will? No, he has not. Instead, he has described his activity as purposeless, meaningless, and inexplicable. The point here is not that a good therapist could help Joe understand why he ate the grape, (although one probably could, which explanation would then dictate that his choice was not free after all,) but rather that if there really is no explanation at all for why he ate the grape, then his behavior (which is free only in the loosest possible sense) cannot in any way be related to the will. It was a motion, a tic, a convulsion, or an accident. But it was not an act of the will. Worse still, the more random and inexplicable the act is in terms of determinate psychological or other causes, the more likely it seems that the act was caused directly by physico-chemical processes (hence the contemporary explanation of seizures) and even less free than an unrestricted yet determined will. The dilemma seems complete then at two levels. On the first level, either the will is not free or freedom has nothing to do with the will. And on the second level, the greater the freedom from any psychological determination, the more direct the determination by physico-chemical processes. Simply put, there is no room for a free will in the contemporary worldview. It just does not make sense. Notice, though, that it is this particular worldview which is incompatible with free will, not some absolute manifestation of reason or truth itself.
Still, if the above dilemma succeeds, and it certainly appears to do so, then either free will is not what it was cracked up to be, or the worldview in which it is excluded is wrong. However, if the idea of free will is then absurd right out of the blocks, what of God? Are his actions then necessarily either inexplicably random or explicably caused? For instance, is there a prior sufficient cause for God creating this world. Of course, there is no force or activity prerequisite to His creation. But was creation a requirement of, say, His character, or of reason? If so, it seems really difficult to maintain a consistent view of Him as God. After all, the very concept of God requires ultimate-ness in every way. If it is correct to assert that God acts both with radical freedom and deliberate will, then it also seems correct either then to impose the same dilemma for free will mentioned above (since it claims that such a free will is incoherent) or to admit that such a concept of free will is even if inexplicable not incoherent at all. After all, something inexplicable in terms of a particular worldview does not have to be incoherent jabber—it could simply be the case that what is phenomenologically obvious is paradigmatically obscure—that is, it appears to be a certain way, but in that way does not fit the current paradigm of explanation. But before that issue (God’s freedom) can be addressed, it is important to put a couple of practical considerations about free will on the table—considerations which make it unpalatable to many.
The previous post on free will established why it is difficult for many to conceive of how there could be a radically free will. The first paragraph below is a reminder of that point. The rest of this post is about how the fact that free will can be abused and can lead to some bad opinions motivates some people errantly to assume it does not actually exist. Both posts are intended only to clarify why it will take so many posts, paragraphs, and arguments to demonstrate the reality and inherent value of a radical free will.
1.2 A Bad Reputation Makes Free Will Seem Undesirable
So there is a metaphysical argument against free will. That is, there is no room for a free will in the reality of this presumed causally closed universe. In fact there is no room beyond the universe for that kind of freedom either—an admission which ought to be disturbing for a theist. But there is also a moral objection to admitting the reality of free will.
In this culture, autonomy takes first place in the race to be the highest value. As with any value, there are good and bad consequences associated with its maintenance. For instance, when the liberty of an individual competes with the value of her own life, or of the life of her fetus, that liberty can be construed as the enemy, and often is. In fact, that construal is not altogether misguided. It does happen in a libertarian culture (such as American culture) that emphatic tolerance can become the very narrow embodiment of and substitute for the fuller reality of freedom. In other words, individual liberty can become so important that the only absolute within culture becomes the toleration of others’ rights.
But there needs to be a distinction made here. There is a difference between a metaphysical and a moral argument. To claim that freedom is metaphysically real is different from arguing for its proper disposition within a moral context. If freedom and life are both real, there remains the issue of resolving how each is to be valued in the context of the other. But regardless of whether that distinction has been appropriately made in the past, free will’s reputation among theists still suffers.
The point here is simply that the assertion of the reality of free will can become confused with the arrogance associated with its use against any and all standards or authority. The error of over-reacting to that effect of freedom (the effect of rejecting any standards of authority) is to undermine liberty’s value on the moral level and dismiss it altogether on the metaphysical level. To put it briefly, free will is taken to be the excuse of the disobedient for their waiting-to-be-condemned existence. It is not something real; it is only an excuse for sin in sinful characters. After all, why else would sinners so adamantly espouse an inscrutable entity! What such an argument overlooks is that free will would most rightly exist only in an environment where it might not exist—where an agent must choose regarding its reality. That choice, along with all others, is not the invention of the creation, but the creation’s responsibility within the context its Creator bestowed. And the fact that a free will is one which can be disobedient and arrogant is an argument neither against its reality nor its significance within reality. In fact, to espouse free will is to espouse the reality that anyone can choose to use or abuse it.
Two previous posts identify the most difficult philosophical obstacle and most obvious practical objection to believing in a radical free will.
This post begins the opposite task: identifying the key theological (or philosophical) problem of rejecting the possibility of radical free will. There will be about six posts working on this part of the task.
Subsequent posts will identify the key moral (or practical) problem of denying the reality of radical free will.
2.1.1 To claim that determinism is rationally necessary impugns God’s sovereignty.
One of the first criticisms of the free will position is that the idea of a truly free will impinges on the sovereignty of God. This criticism is actually just an extension of free will’s bad reputation. Of course, not even the critics of free will could take this accusation seriously. Nothing can meaningfully, significantly, nor certainly successfully assault the sovereignty of God. But there are plenty of opinions which either underestimate or impugn it—the sovereignty of God, that is. And although critics of free will accuse it of doing just that—impugning the sovereignty of God—it turns out that believing it impossible that God’s omnipotent sovereignty can coexist with libertarian will is much more malignant to the opinion of God’s absolute authority.
Suppose two ardent theists disagree about freedom and determinism. To make it simple, Val believes in libertarian (radically free) will while Dieter does not. Dieter claims Val’s belief in free will impugns the sovereignty of God since the freedom of His creatures implies either slackness, culpability, or outright ignorance on the part of the God necessitated by Val’s system. How could God be sovereign if He does not have control over how the creatures act in every detail within Val’s system?
Val has a few answers which do not satisfy Dieter. For instance, God does not need to control the decisions made by the creatures since He controls both the options available to them and the consequences of every decision. Or, since God made the creatures’ will and freedom, He is sovereign in their expression of it. But Dieter claims these arguments only sideswipe the real issue, either pushing it back a step or missing it altogether. So Val dives more directly and deeply into the issue by using the very tool which seems to have him trapped: the necessity of reason.
In Dieter’s view, radical free will is necessarily excluded from any possible world where God is sovereign. In such a view, determinism is a necessary consequence of God’s nature (or, in some views, God’s nature is a necessary consequence of determinism.) Dieter’s God is one whose sovereignty would be impugned by human freedom. In Val’s view God is free to choose whether He creates a world with free will or one which is determined, or even both for that matter. The point, which should be obvious now, is that Val and Dieter have to choose between believing in a God who could not create a world with free will, or a God who could.
Out of a respect for rationality, Dieter chooses to believe in a God whose control is never less than complete. He not only knows everything that will happen, but has willed it to be so and effected His will. He sufficiently causes every birth, marriage, and death, not to mention every abortion, divorce, and murder. Isaiah 45:7 seems clear enough: God creates evil. He does not shirk responsibility for it and no human has the right to judge Him for so creating.
Not out of mere preference, but what seems to him the very nature of God, Val chooses to believe in a God who can create a world with radical free will. In short, Val reasons that if he must choose between worshiping God as One who can make such a world or as One who cannot, it makes more sense to worship Him as One who can. Now whether He did create such a world or not is a different matter. But at least at this point Val is satisfied that He is worshiping the greatest (and only) God more truly by acknowledging that He is able to create a world with free will and remain sovereign. After all, Isaiah 45:7 no more implies that God creates acts of evil than placing the tree in Eden and commanding Adam not to eat from it implies that God really chose or desired for Adam to eat from it. The question of how His sovereignty is maintained is separate and not resolved here. It may be the point that man had freedom to choose evil or to reject it only because God created the category of evil, but not individual acts of evil. Or it may be the point that while man could choose whether to eat the fruit or not, he had no freedom about the consequences of his choice, the realm in which God’s sovereignty was manifest again though it never really waned. The point for now is simply that whatever the means, it is at least the case that God need lose no sovereignty just because man can choose freely.
Determinists should read at least this much into this post: it is just as rationally inconsistent to advocate for the sovereignty of God and reject the possibility of free will as it is to advocate His sovereignty and embrace free will.
But the point of the post is this: determinism faces a contradiction advocating God’s sovereignty while rejecting His ability to create free will. The point of upcoming posts is to show why the free will position does not face the same problem, since there actually are consistent ways to speak of God’s absolute authority (even with the doctrine of maintenance) including a world with radically free will.
2.1.2 Attempting to explain God’s activity questions His sovereignty.
2.1.2.1 Claiming this world is necessarily the best of all possible worlds is an example of inappropriately explaining God’s activity.
Back to the nature of God’s freedom, which is important as a conceptual framework within which human freedom can then be described: To describe free will as logically absurd diminishes a person’s understanding of God. Why? Here’s a question that narrows the discussion a bit: is it better to describe God as free or rational? (Remember the first problem faced by those who believe in free will.) Obviously the position of this argument is that the best way to express God’s omnipotence and primacy is with His free will. Consider one philosophical system in which reason takes God’s place.
Leibniz’s argument about God’s rational behavior is built on his assumption that everything can be explained in terms of the principle of sufficient reason. (More specifically, the two fundamental principles are of non-contradiction and of sufficient reason. According to Leibniz, God first decrees to act in accordance with the principle of sufficient reason. The rest follows logically.) The principle of sufficient reason asserts simply enough that when intelligence acts it must always act in accordance with the best reason available—for God, obviously, the best reason period. So Leibniz is able to handle the problem of evil easily. The problem of evil is about why evil exists in a world created by an omnipotent and just God. In his system the answer is that this world is the best of all possible worlds. How can anyone make that claim? If God knows all the possible worlds and chooses freely among them all for the one He will actualize, then the principle of sufficient reason makes it necessary that He choose the best one to actualize. Common sense agrees. If God could create any world He wanted and chose to create this one, He must have done it for some good reason. And whatever that reason is must be sufficient to explain that this world is better than any other world He could have created, otherwise He would have created the other one. The only other option is that God acted irrationally by creating this inferior world.
However, for Leibniz to claim that this world is necessarily the best of all possible worlds is for him to place God in a position inappropriate to His supreme nature. Applying the principle of sufficient reason to God does nothing more than make God subservient to a tool He gave for evaluating and relating means and ends in the creation, not in the Creator. Applying the principle of sufficient reason to God makes no sense in the light of passages like Isaiah 40:28, where there is no searching of His understanding. There is no large leap between so dismissing the principle of sufficient reason regarding God and acknowledging that He has acted and acts now in complete freedom.
Perhaps a determinist would claim that God acts based on prior sufficient causes which happen to remain unknown to humanity. Two responses need attention. First, such a claim seems meaningless. Claiming that God’s actions are indeed explicable while at the same time claiming that the explanation eludes human comprehension is futile at best and deliberately obscure at worst—an inexplicable explanation! But second, that there is some (even logically rather than chronologically) prior sufficient cause to explain God’s actions leaves a very difficult question regarding the primacy of God. Just exactly how supreme is a God who must act in accordance with any standard whatsoever? The standard seems newly supreme.
God does not do anything of necessity. The only necessities which could be ascribed by humans to God (wrongly, of course) are those derived from standards known by humans only through God’s revelation. Here, of course, some theologians demand a distinction between general and special revelation. But that distinction misses the point. The message of general revelation is only meaningful within the context of God’s very specific activity (of creation, for instance.) To think that any conclusion or process derived from that revelation (general or special) has some kind of authority over God is senseless for the theist. It is not just arrogant for people to hold God to such a standard, it is logically indefensible. There is nothing people can know about God beyond what God has made possible for them to know. It is neither reasonable nor consistent with revelation to believe that people have the knowledge, understanding, or wisdom to assert that there is a cause for what God does, much less what that cause might be. To make this point very clear: why bog God down in either the infinite regress of epistemology or the vicious circularity of reason? Saying God acts in accordance with reason puts God’s activity into the same rationally unjustified realm as reason’s foundation (the law of non-contradiction). While the law of non-contradiction is an obvious foundation on which to build reason’s structures, it is itself unjustified by any other rational argument. God is the answer to epistemology’s catastrophe. To ask ultimate questions regarding why God does this or that is to ask the child’s question of who made God, only in a slightly different domain.
The problem with the position that this world is the best of all possible worlds is pretty clear in the context of just a couple of specific necessities. To put it rhetorically but not unfairly, to claim that God could choose to actualize none other world than this one is to claim that He could choose none other than to sacrifice Christ or, even more uncomfortably, that He could choose none other than to redeem some particular person among the elect. Such a limitation on God’s freedom seems inappropriate at best, downright heretical at worst. For a more loaded example, it makes evil necessary. While there is not enough justification to weigh in thoroughly on this topic here, a couple of brief comments can make the point. Consider it in these terms, claiming that the world could not have been otherwise is either to claim that a reason superior to God necessitated an evil which God did not choose freely or that God’s very nature necessitates the existence of evil. (As a brief aside: the better option is the one afforded by libertarianism, that this particular world—the one with evil in it—is not the necessary result of anything, but the contingent result of God’s free creation of a world with freedom in which He expresses sovereignty over His creatures’ possession of free will and the consequences–even immediate–of their choices.) Such a statement is extensionally equivalent to the claim that God could not exist without evil. Such a claim is unacceptable to anyone who holds God both supreme and good.
Still on the second part of the overall journey engaged by this set of posts, this entry attempts to show why a sub-point of the claim that even God acts only within reason (rather than with radical freedom) results in a fallacious limitation of God’s sovereignty.
2.1.2.1.1 There is no reason to exclude contingency from descriptions of God.
As the previous post argues, there is no reason to believe God needed to choose between worlds, one of which was best or even better than the others.
But there is something else wrong with the assumption that this world is the best of all possible worlds. The rationalist’s question is why, if God knows everything about all possible worlds and has all power, it would not make sense to surmise that He has actualized the best of those worlds in submission (a term anathema to the supremacy of God) to reason. The question itself is misleading and overlooks something about what is possible to God.
There is an old paradox about God changing. If God is perfect, then He cannot change. If He changes, then He is not (or was not) perfect. A God who is static seems oddly out of character with the God of the Bible while a God who changes seems hardly transcendent to this changing world. Probably the most obvious response to that paradox is to acknowledge that God’s character (describable as, for instance, His morally significant qualities) does not change although the circumstances around Him do change and His activity regarding those circumstances (or anything else) does (or can) change. That change is a contingency about God. God does not have to answer a prayer, but He does. God does not have to save a particular person but He does. Acknowledging that God can have contingent states (even of activity) without compromising His essential qualities admits the statements which were the point of this discussion to begin with: that God’s will can be expressed contingently without impugning His sovereignty.
But that claim (that God’s sovereignty is compatible with contingency) does not square with the argument that if God must choose the best of all possible worlds then this world must (necessarily) be the best of all. After all, there is no room for contingency where necessity dictates what is actualized.
If you’ve lost track of how this fits in with the overall argument for free will, consider this: If God has a radical free will, then radical free will is not impossible as a concept. If God must create the world a certain way according to the principle of sufficient reason, then He may not have free will. So demonstrating that God does not have to create the world a certain way removes that barrier to the possibility that God has a free will, and therefore to the possibility that man has a free will. Again, none of the arguments so far addresses whether there is free will or not; only whether there could be.
2.1.2.1.2 That God repents is evidence that God makes things the best, not that He must simply act within some externally defined best.
Even accepting the mistaken idea that there are a finite number of possibilities (too great a limit on God) there is still no reason to believe that there cannot be a plurality of morally equivalent possibilities. The scriptural use of “repentance” in reference to God makes the point. Reducing repentance to relenting neither addresses the problem nor deals fairly with the vocabulary—no one has a problem using the same word to mean repentance when it concerns humans. Is it not the case that every time God has mercy it is because He has repented? His pronouncement of judgment is not false. His mercy is real because the condemnation of the guilty is real and that guilty soul’s future without God is as really condemned as any future can be real. His act of mercy then overturns His pronouncement of judgment—which is why it is mercy. It is not necessity. If it were necessity, then His mercy might as well be called justice. The distinguishing characteristic of mercy is that it is bestowed upon those who, in every sense meaningful to humanity, should not receive it. And to think of moral necessity (ought-ness) as something necessarily excluded from metaphysical actuality is right in the heart of the dilemma every theistic determinist faces. For the determinist, God has taught people that some things ought to be, then made it so that they are not and indeed cannot be. That untenable position being abandoned, the only option left is to acknowledge that God’s mercy is bestowed by a God who acts not of necessity, but freely.
But if God is repenting, is it in response to changes in man? After all, God could be changing without regard to anything outside of Himself. He could act that way. But the many descriptions of God interacting with the requests of humans in scripture do not paint a picture of arbitrary activity disconnected either volitionally or causally from creation. But if God is bestowing mercy in response to man’s activity, then is man not meriting his salvation? The answer is no. God’s repentance can be understood and explained (as God has revealed it) insofar as and because there is a consistent relationship between man’s repentance and God’s subsequent mercy. But in no way does man’s faith toward God merit salvation. Saying that something can be explained as a matter of fact is different from saying it is necessary, whether morally (as if it were merited) or naturally (as if God had no choice).
Two problems remain for this picture of God’s repentance. One has simply to do with God’s sovereignty, the other with the point of bringing up God’s repentance in the first place. On the one: just how sovereign is a God whose activity is contingent on the activity of His creation? If God acts in response (even if anticipated) to His creatures, then are not the creatures making the final calls about what happens? Again, the answer is no. God is still sovereign. God has declared that those with faith are redeemed and those without are damned. When a condemned person chooses faith in Christ, God’s repentance is expressed in His choosing to extend mercy to that person—consistent with what He had always said He would do. The soul is now redeemed not because she believed, but because God declared that all who believe are redeemed and has chosen to act faithfully regarding His declaration. A determinist might think the problem has been hidden in an equivocation. Perhaps her faith was not sufficient to produce redemption, but it was necessary, and the necessity of faith for redemption is just as undermining to sovereignty as the sufficiency of faith for redemption. But her faith is no more necessary to salvation than God has declared, leaving God’s sovereignty as unthreatened as it always necessarily is.
But what of the other problem, the one about which this issue was raised to begin with? Whether God condemns or redeems this person (who either rejects or chooses faith) He is still acting perfectly in accordance with His own chosen will. But how? If it is better that someone be redeemed than lost (or vice versa) then is it not obviously the case that God must choose the best? But one option (condemning or redeeming) need not have either a greater or lesser moral value than the other. In fact, most systematic Calvinists tend to hold something like this view. That is, God is glorified equally when condemning or redeeming. Indeed, as that view can hold, the measure of His grace toward some is fully revealed only in contrast to the actuality of His condemnation toward others. But more importantly God makes of whatever possibility is actualized the best of all possibilities. In fact, that activity of God is what redemption appears to be all about throughout scripture. It is not fortunate that Adam sins. But God does not destroy Adam and start over either. Instead, God makes of a miserably fallen world the best actuality that ever could have been. The fallen world is not necessarily the best of all possible worlds. Rather, God acts in His sovereignty to make the world which has been affected by Adam’s sin not just the best it can be, but the very best world which ever could have been. He redeems creation, and the freedom in it is no threat to Him doing so.
The following section does not argue that revelation would have to be unimportant if determinism were true, but rather that the more likely indeterminacy and contingency are, the more fundamentally important special revelation is. It is a point which emerges from the freedom of God and leads then inevitably to the responsibility of people to respond to submit to the revelation.
2.1.2.1.3 The significance of contingency and revelation are directly proportional.
The fact that the universe could be otherwise, its contingency, is what makes revelation so essential. There are a couple of different means by which humanity can discern truth: reason and revelation. By reason (which is really just an aspect of general revelation) people discern what is necessarily true. (At the conclusion of this post it is implicit that “necessarily” only means something is necessary subsequent to God’s choice to make it so.) But truth which cannot be known by reason alone—what is not necessarily so, but only contingently so—people can know only by revelation. (Experience can provide “knowledge” of sorts, but not of truth, as the series of posts on science contends. But repeating that argument here is not called for.)
Now, considering the choice to be made between the priority of either reason or revelation, the proposed contradiction between God’s omnipotence and His supposed impotence to give up that power in any way has something to say. Open theists even use that dilemma (that God does not have power to give up power) to claim (errantly) that every theist limits God. Normally, though, the limitation sounds something more like “God can only do what can be done.” The point is that in the dispute between limiting God based on reason or limiting reason based on God, it should be obvious that every theist ought to limit reason based on God.
Granted: To say that the universe is contingent (and that God has power to do anything or everything, even make a four sided triangle) does create a contradiction; it violates reason. But to say God cannot do everything violates more than reason—it violates the nature and claims of God. It is better to violate reason than the revelation of God, as this post argues. That being the case, it makes sense to think of Christian truths first in terms of revelation, then in terms of reason.
Holding revelation superior to reason allows believers to defend some biblical doctrines which reason cannot and indeed should not either fully or uniquely justify. In terms of theology or ethics, for instance, contingency (the fact that the universe is so only because God has freely chosen to make it that way) means that theologians and philosophers cannot begin with reason to justify what ought to be or what is. Instead, they must discover and describe what is and ought to be based first on specific revelation. Pacifism might be rationally justifiable, but it is not what the scriptures teach. Women might be essentially identical or even superior to men in every way significant to leadership, but revelation specifies (and contingency allows for) gendered roles. Why? Quite possibly for no reason beyond God’s choice. And how can any such perspective be known as truth? Through revelation, with only potential support or verification coming from another tool contingent on God’s will, reason.
This post concludes the first difficulty of denying the reality of free will. That first difficulty is that it underestimates the nature and power of God.
2.1.2.2 Even explaining God’s foreknowledge while accepting free will is too great a limit on God.
Using God’s foreknowledge of possibilities as a means of explaining freedom while maintaining God’s control of events misses the significance of freedom (Molinism’s failure regarding the significance of human freedom is not the point of this paper, but it can be mentioned briefly. Creating layers between God’s knowledge and the actions of his creatures in the future does not eliminate the apparent problem for freedom foreknowledge forces. That is, if God knowing the activity of a person means she does not have an option, then God knowing what she will do in every possible circumstance still does not leave her a genuine option since God knows which world [and therefore which circumstances] He will actualize. That is, God actualizing only the circumstances which will produce a certain choice makes her choice no freer than the compatiblist’s subject, although her determination is buried one layer deeper) and inappropriately attempts to explain the knowledge of God. The question is how God could know the future without eliminating genuine options from His creatures. Jonathan Edwards makes a compelling case that foreknowledge precludes freedom. Since God has always had foreknowledge of everything, there is no possibility that things could be other than they have been and will be. The future is as necessary (Although later authors and thinkers distinguish between certainty and necessity, the point for Edwards is the same. The future is as necessary as the past. Further, necessity and certainty are indistinguishable when God’s activity is so pervasive in nature that each moment is practically a re-creation.) as the past; otherwise God’s knowledge would have been incomplete at some point. Once God knows it, it must be. God has always known it. So it must always have been that it would necessarily be the way it has been or will be.
One attempt to get around this objection to freedom is to expand the scope of God’s foreknowledge not only to include all possible worlds, but also to include exactly what every free creature would do in every one of those possible worlds. As God actualizes the world based on His knowledge of what His free creatures will do He maintains sovereign control of what will transpire and His foreknowledge is explicable in the context of still-free creatures. There is something likable about that approach. But there is also something wrong with it.
Here is what is wrong. Although Molinism attempts to salvage freedom and foreknowledge without falling into the ultimately non-theistic abyss of misnamed open theism, it does so by making an unwarranted assertion about God—or, more specifically, about how God comes to know something. Effectively, Molinism claims that God knows all the possible worlds and what all of his free creatures would do in each of those worlds and, because He knows which world He will actualize He knows what will happen. Such an explanation of how God knows something is not called for. God’s complete knowledge of the future need not be the product of the interaction of His will with a complex set of counterfactuals. Such an explanation presumes too much and too little about God. It presumes too much by pretending there is something about God’s acquisition of knowledge which men both can and ought to explain. It presumes too little by thinking that God’s knowledge is bound by the same possibilities humans associate with their knowledge. Suppose it is the case that humans can only know something if it is either logically necessary or experientially evident. Such a fork (as Hume’s) has no bearing on God. God’s knowledge of the contingent future need in no way be restricted by human epistemology. To cut the Gordian knot, God knows the future, including the actions of His free creatures, because He is God. Not being able to explain how He has that knowledge should be no less disconcerting than not being able to explain how He is three persons but only one God or how Christ is eternally the same and yet becomes complete through suffering. Neither should the inability to explain the mechanism of God’s foreknowledge incline a theist toward open theism—a diminished view of God based solely on the mistaken idea that what cannot be explained (how God could know a future which does not exist) cannot be (that God knows a future which does not exist.) As always, it is not important for a person to know how or why God knows something, only that she acknowledge that God knows it.
The next post in this series begins the second problem with denying the reality of free will: the loss of moral responsibility.
