Free Will in Philosophical Theology

Kevin Timpe

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781501308680
• eBook ISBN: 9781441196767
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophical Metaphysics

Free Will in Philosophical Theology takes the most recent philosophical work on free will and uses it to elucidate and explore theological doctrines involving free will. Rather than being a work of natural theology, it is a work in what has been called clarification-using philosophy to understand, develop, systematize, and explain theological claims without first raising the justification for holding the theological claims that one is working with. Timpe's aim is to show how a particular philosophical account of the nature of free will-an account known as source incompatibilism-can help us understand a range of theological doctrines.

1

The Nature and Importance of Free Will

Freedom makes man a moral subject. When he acts deliberately, man is, so to speak, the father of his acts. Human acts, that is, acts that are freely chosen in consequence of a judgment of conscience, can be morally evaluated. They are either good or evil.

Catechism of the Catholic Church¹

I have attempted . . . to state the philosophy in which I have come to believe. I will not call it my philosophy; for I did not make it. God and humanity made it; and it made me.

G. K. Chesterton²

1.1 Introduction

Western philosophy has a long and venerable tradition of reflecting on the nature of free will. It is sometimes said that Augustine discovered the faculty of the will and as a result inaugurated philosophy’s fascination with issues related to free will.³ While philosophers prior to Augustine clearly discussed the closely related issues of, for example, voluntariness and agency, one finds in Augustine an explicit focus on free will that one would be hard-pressed to find in earlier thinkers. Augustine addressed the importance of free will in many of his works, including his famous Confessions and City of God, as well as in the earlier On Free Choice of the Will. And since Augustine’s day, the vast majority of the great philosophers from the medieval and modern periods—Anselm, Aquinas, Ockham, Scotus, Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, and Kant, to name but a few—have written on free will. This trend continues into the contemporary philosophical literature; if anything, there is a more vibrant ongoing philosophical conversation about free will than ever. And there is no indication that this trend will change at any time in the near future.

But, as contemporary American political discourse indicates, the popularity of a topic doesn’t always breed care or accuracy in the discussion of that topic. In a recent discussion of the importance of philosophical reflection on free will, Daniel Dennett says the following:

I recently confronted the question of why so many really intelligent people write such ill-considered stuff when the topic is free will. The answer . . . is that in some inchoate way they sense—correctly—that it really matters, and they just don’t want to contemplate the implications straightforwardly, in case the truth is too horrible to live with. This makes wishful thinking and other distortions of reason almost irresistible. If the arguments they are tempted by were somehow imbedded in less forbidding contexts, they would see through them in an instant. People don’t do their best work when they think the stakes are astronomically high.⁴

Dennett’s belief that “the stakes are high”—that it matters that we get our beliefs about free will right—is perhaps one reason that discussions of free will have been so prominent in philosophy the past few decades.

But free will is not thought to be important only in philosophical circles. The same is true of the related discipline of theology as well, as free will can be found to occupy an important, if not vital, place in a variety of theological perspectives. If one opens a book from contemporary theologians, one is almost certain to find at least some discussion of free will. Karl Barth, perhaps the most influential theologian of the past century, stresses the centrality of free will for the theological enterprise as follows:

Even though we stress ever so strongly that God’s authority is finally at issue, the idea of a rigid causality arises. But this may not be. We are dealing with God’s address to people. But people as such cannot be regarded as the effects of causes. When they are on their own and conscious of themselves they set themselves apart from and over against the nexus of cause and effect. They are not merely conditioned. They also condition. They think and will. What might come to them as mere authority and make them effects does not really come to them. It does not touch their humanity. We are saying that God’s Word speaks to us. Here is an event that cannot take an automatic form. It has the form of a constraint that is possible and actual only in the sphere of freedom. The same is true when we say that someone believes and obeys. The compulsion here is obviously different from that of a rolling ball. It either takes place in freedom or not at all. We ultimately understand the concept of authority itself very poorly if we think of it only as a superior force and do not see that we have here the power of a command which can be heard and obeyed only in the sphere of freedom.⁵

Barth’s stress of the centrality of free will for theology is by no means unique; one finds the same theme among many other disparate theologians—from Thomas Oden⁶ to David Burrell⁷; from Rowan Williams⁸ to John Milbank⁹—and across the gamut of theological perspectives—from open theism¹⁰ to Reformed thought¹¹; from neo-Thomism to Radical Orthodoxy. As even this all too quick discussion shows, free will is of interest to theologians. And one reason is that free will is central to key aspects of Christian theology. To take just one example, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which aims to “guard and present better the precious deposit of Christian doctrine” and to be “a statement of the Church’s faith and of catholic doctrine,”¹² affirms not only that God has free will¹³ but that various aspects of creation have it as well, describing both humans and angels as “intelligent and free creatures.”¹⁴ But while it affirms the reality of free will and its relation to other theological issues like human nature, sin, and redemption, the Catechism does not provide a philosophical account of what free will is. For that is not a task of the theological enterprise, but of philosophy.

Of course, theology’s interest in free will is not unconnected with philosophy’s interest in it. Many of the issues which motivate interest in free will are the same across both disciplines—issues of responsibility, desert, punishment, meaning, autonomy, value, etc. . . . But, in an unfortunate trend that has been noted by others, too often the practitioners of these two disciplines have not interacted in the ways that their shared interests would suggest would be beneficial. In a recent book on the intersection of analytic philosophy and theology, Michael Rea describes the situation as follows:

Many theologians have very different ideas from analytic philosophers about how theology (and philosophy) ought to be done, and about the value of analytic approaches to theological topics. Whereas philosophy in the English-speaking world is dominated by analytic approaches to its problems and projects, theology has been dominated by alternative approaches. . . . The methodological divide between systematic theologians and analytic philosophers of religion is ripe for exploration. It is of obvious theoretical importance to both disciplines, but it also has practical importance. . . . The problem isn’t just that academics with different methodological perspectives have trouble conversing with one another. Rather, it is that, by and large, the established figures in both disciplines don’t even view mutual conversation as worth pursuing. They ignore one another. They (implicitly or explicitly) encourage their students to ignore one another. . . . And the divide only grows.¹⁵

Rea intends his volumes to be part of an interdisciplinary conversation about the value of analytic philosophical work on theological topics. Such a project is, of course, not new. But it is a project worthy of serious attention. And the present volume is intended to be in the same vein. In fact, the primary goal of the present volume is to tell a theological story philosophically. At the heart of this story is the belief that how we think about free will shapes many central theological claims. Subsequent chapters will show various ways in which this is true. But these chapters are not just a collection of independent theological issues; they instead follow a traditional theological pattern known as exitus reditus: “the coming forth (exitus) of all things from God, and the return (reditus) of all things, particularly man, to God as to the ultimate goal.”¹⁶ Before I discuss how the latter chapters contribute to this pattern, however, the following two sections give some necessary background to my approach.

1.2 Philosophical theology

As mentioned in the previous section, this book stands at the intersection of philosophy and theology. Perhaps the most common type of project at this intersection is what is known as natural theology. Natural theology’s name can be misleading, for it sounds like what is being done is a kind of theology, not philosophy. But natural theology is better understood to be primarily philosophical rather than theological for it is, most generally, the attempt to establish truths about God or other theological matters on the basis of natural human reason, unaided by revelation. Natural theology is commonly understood along the lines of an Aristotelian demonstrative science. In an insightful article on philosophical theology, Scott MacDonald describes this understanding of natural theology as follows:

Conceiving of natural theology as a kind of demonstrative science allows us to characterize it precisely: it consists of truths about God which are either (1) self-evident or evident to sense perception or (2) derived by deductively valid proofs the (ultimate) premises of which are evident in one of these two ways . . . . Demonstrative science’s great power, however, is purchased at a price. A demonstrative science possesses the virtues of rigor, objectivity, and certainty only because its criteria for admissible data and methods are very strict: the resources available to demonstrative scientists include only evident truths (their data) and deductive argument forms (their method). For this reason, we might call the sort of natural theology that adopts the restrictions of demonstrative science strict natural theology.¹⁷

This is not a work in what MacDonald calls strict natural theology. In what follows, I do not attempt to prove the existence of God, nor use the tools of philosophy to demarcate the nature of such a being. Instead, I will assume a particular theological framework and attempt to show how recent work in the metaphysics of free will can help elucidate and defend various aspects of that theological framework. As with most contemporary philosophical theology and analytic philosophy of religion, the present volume assumes a Christian theological framework.¹⁸ More specifically, I take as a serious desideratum being able to affirm traditional Christian theological doctrines. Though many of these doctrines (e.g., the Trinity, the Incarnation, the atonement) will not be directly relevant to the coming chapters, other orthodox Christian theological claims will be quite relevant (e.g., that God not be the author of sin given His essential omnibenevolence, that God is a personal agent capable of acting, that humanity is created in the imago dei, etc . . .). I will not, however, argue for these doctrines. Rather, my primary task is to give a philosophically coherent defense of various theological doctrines according to that general framework using recent work in the metaphysics of free will.

The present volume is thus a work of what is often called philosophical theology: “the application of the techniques of philosophical analysis to the central doctrines of the Christian faith.”¹⁹ Philosophical theology, as I understand the phrase, is broader than what MacDonald above defined as strict natural theology. Like MacDonald, I do not question the possibility or success of strict natural theology. But, as MacDonald points out, “even if strict natural theology represents an appropriately philosophical manner of reflection on theological matters, it is a mistake to think of it as the only sort of theological reflection open to philosophers.”²⁰ Whereas one task of philosophy is justification, “establishing the truth of certain [philosophical] propositions, thereby providing us with epistemic justification for and securing the rationality of our believing,”²¹ another of its appropriate roles is what MacDonald calls clarification. The philosophical theologian engaged in clarification is

not primarily concerned with the epistemic justification of [a particular view]. She is concerned instead with understanding, developing, systematizing, and explaining it. It is possible for her to do all these things without raising the issue of its truth or her justification for holding it. The fact is that a very large part of philosophy has nothing directly to do with the truth or justification of certain theories or propositions clarification of theological matters is a legitimate task for the philosopher. Philosophers have not only a justificatory but also a clarificatory role to play in theology. Moreover, given that the nature of clarificatory activities is such that one can engage in them without regard to the epistemic status of the theories one takes up, it follows that there can be no epistemic restrictions of any sort on the kinds of issues open to philosophical clarification. . . . [The philosophical theologian] can legitimately undertake the investigation of not only the question of God’s existence and attributes—issues associated with traditional natural theology—but also doctrines such as trinity, incarnation, and atonement—traditional paradigms of doctrines inaccessible to natural reason. When the philosopher takes up these kinds of issues with the aim of articulating and developing them, probing their int...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• 1 The Nature and Importance of Free Will
• 2 Free Will and the Good
• 3 The Primal Sin
• 4 Realigning a Fallen Will
• 5 Damned Freedom
• 6 Perfected Freedom
• 7 Divine Freedom
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index