Fate and Free Will

A Defense of Theological Determinism

Heath White

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780268106317
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Libre albedrío y determinismo en filosofía

In Fate and Free Will, Heath White explores and defends a traditional view of God's relationship to creation that has in recent years fallen out of favor. White argues that theological determinism—the idea that God is directly responsible for every detail of history and existence—is relevant to concepts such as human responsibility, freedom, and justice; the meaning of life; and theodicy. Defending theological determinism from the perspective of traditional orthodox Christianity, White clarifies this view, positions it within scripture, and argues positively for it through considerations about divine attributes and via the idea of an ex nihilo creation.

White addresses objections to theological determinism by presenting nuanced and insightful counterarguments. He asserts that theological determinism does not undermine practices of criminal punishment, destroy human responsibility, render life meaningless, or hinder freedom. While the book does not attempt to answer every dilemma concerning evil or hell, it effectively grapples with them. To make his case for theological determinism, White relies on theories of free will, moral responsibility, and a meaningful life. He uses clear commonsense language and vivid illustrations to bring to light the conditions of meaning and purpose in our lives and the metaphysics of God's relationship to the world. This original book will appeal to the philosophical community as well as students and scholars of theology.

NOTES

Introduction

1. Thoroughly enumerating the options, and the literature, on the problem of human freedom and divine foreknowledge is beyond the scope of the present work. A good place to start is Zagzebski, “Foreknowledge and Free Will.”

2. The Molinist will object to this way of putting things. I will argue later that the objection does not have as much force as might first appear.

3. D’Holbach, System of Nature, chap. 11, “Of the System of Man’s Free Agency.”

4. McCann, Creation and the Sovereignty of God, chap. 10.

5. Some might prefer explananda to be facts rather than events. For these theorists, I will assume that explaining the fact that E occurred is tantamount to explaining E.

6. Many libertarians will say, for instance, that free choices have explanations, namely, the reasons for the choices, and are not mere brute contingencies. It is just that such explanations are not of the entailing sort I am calling “complete.” If one prefers, I can say that TD allows for more explanations (why one should make this choice rather than the alternative) or better ones (entailment rather than some less demanding notion).

7. Van Inwagen, “The Place of Chance in a World Sustained by God,” 229.

8. As I have defined it, TD is compatible with a God of limited knowledge, so some consequences of his will might even be unforeseen. This would be a peculiar and unmotivated version of TD, however.

9. McCann, in Creation and the Sovereignty of God, defines “libertarianism” in a way that renders it compatible with some forms of TD. This definition, however, strikes me, as well as several reviewers of his book, as idiosyncratic.

10. I believe the terminology of leeway vs. source incompatibilism traces to Pereboom, “Source Incompatibilism and Alternative Possibilities,”186, although the basic contrast can be found in earlier writings.

11. Some important questions are raised by Wolterstorff in “God Everlasting” and by Swinburne in The Coherence of Theism. One principle motivation for denying divine eternity involves making space for human libertarian free will, but for an advocate of TD, this motivation naturally has no force. My own views can be readily inferred from what I say later. The main lines of Helm’s Eternal God and McCann’s Creation and the Sovereignty of God, chap. 3, are also constructive replies to the major objections.

12. G. Strawson, “The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility.”

13. For Pereboom’s views about free will and moral responsibility, see, inter alia, his Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life. There are passages in this book in which Pereboom discusses applications to the philosophy of religion, but for more focused discussions see his “Free Will, Evil, and Divine Providence” and “Libertarianism and Theological Determinism.”

14. Couenhaven, “The Problem of God’s Immutable Freedom,” 305.

15. An interesting comment on this topic, citing Dean Zimmerman, can be found in DeRose, “Calvinism —A Report.” Zimmerman speculates that while pastors and theologians work in largely religious environments, Christian philosophers are in more secular environments and thus have to deal more closely with the problem of evil as a challenge to faith. Libertarian free will seems like an attractive route out of that problem.

16. See Hunt, “Divine Providence and Simple Foreknowledge,” 400, n. 6.

17. The locus classicus is Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity, chap. 9. It is hard to overestimate the impact of this argument by Plantinga on the subsequent philosophy of religion.

18. In other words, one might defend a position about the divine will analogous to the Ockhamist solution to the problem for human free will posed by divine foreknowledge.

19. See Koons, “Dual Agency,” and Grant, “Can a Libertarian Hold That Our Free Acts Are Caused by God?”

ONE. Divine Action

1. I am hardly the first to use this analogy. Among others, see McCann, Creation and the Sovereignty of God, 45, and Ross, “Creation II,” 126–27.

2. The concepts in this paragraph are covered in Markosian, “Time.” Stump and Kretzmann, in “Eternity,” and Rogers, in Anselm on Freedom, 181ff., advocate views on divine eternity compatible with A theories of time.

3. O’Connor, Persons and Causes, 52–55. A different point: most agent causation theorists are libertarians, but compatibilist versions of agent causation are outlined in Markosian, “A Compatibilist Version of the Theory of Agent Causation,” and in Nelkin, Making Sense of Freedom and Responsibility, chap. 4. Since the point of this paragraph is that I have no brief either for or against agent causation in this work, I won’t explore the different varieties of it.

4. A timeline and references can be found in Lee, “Occasionalism.”

5. Baker, “Why Christians Should Not Be Libertarians.”

6. Many actual advocates of the Depravity Argument are not likely to think God lacks any providential control here. My point is that the Depravity Argument does not rule out such a lack. This just means that the divine sovereignty assumed by its actual proponents has a source other than that found in the Depravity Argument. Flint levels a critique of Thomism along these lines in Divine Providence, 90–91.

7. This paragraph, and the next two, are strongly influenced by Pruss, “Omnirationality.”

8. Raz, “Practical Reason and Norms,” 39.

9. Actually, this principle needs refinement, in that the means need to be known, and a few other factors. But the refinements don’t affect the cogency of the objection or of the reply to it.

10. Stump, “Petitionary Prayer,” 81.

11. Peterson et al., Reason and Religious Belief, 177.

12. Prayers could cause events in the ordinary way. For example, loud ones can cause annoyance. Conceivably, via some butterfly-effect type mechanism, prayers could cause events which fulfill them. There is no reason to think this is true, however, nor do I know of anyone who believes it, so I shall leave this possibility aside.

13. We could cast this point in terms of divine immutability. Nothing brings about changes in God, and petitionary prayers don’t either.

14. It also has the problem that the causation has to come about “in the right way.” Hursthouse, “Intention,” argues effectively (in another context) that there is no way to specify when such causes happen “in the right way” except by appeal to final causes or teleology.

15. This is the main problem treated in Stump’s article.

16. Pascal, Pensees, section 513, echoing Aquinas, Summa Theologica I.22, 23.

17. O’Connor, “Against Theological Determinism,” 138. Emphasis original.

18. I am not absolutely sure on this point. If God can create various kinds of creature-creature causal relations, might he be able to create special kinds of creatorcreature causal relations?

TWO. Why Believe Theological Determinism?

1. Jeremiah 3:20. See Boyd, God of the Possible, for many more passages along these lines.

2. Mark 14:30.

3. Jeremiah 38:17–18.

4. Ephesians 1:11.

5. Couenhaven, Stricken by Sin, Cured by Christ, 101.

6. Ibid., 104 and n. 72.

7. Davies, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas, 159 and 175.

8. Pasnau, Aquinas on Human Nature, chap. 7.4.

9. Luther, The Bondage of the Will, 80–81.

10. Helm, John Calvin’s Ideas, 125.

11. Ibid., 161.

12. Edwards, Freedom of the Will, 24.

13. Edwards, The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended, 223.

14. Schwenkler, in “Understanding Practical Knowledge,” section 3, explains the idea well with reference to the thought of Aquinas, in the context of interpreting Anscombe, Intention.

15. Variations on this theme can be found in Geach, Providence and Evil; Hasker, God, Time, and Knowledge; Pinnock, The Openness of God; and Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism.

16. Beilby and Eddy, Divine Foreknowledge, 133. Craig actually says “innate ideas,” but he clearly wants these to be propositions, so I think “a priori knowledge” is a charitable interpretation.

17. McCann makes a related set of objections to middle knowledge. See Creation and the Sovereignty of God, 86ff.

18. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy.

19. A point made strongly by Hasker in God, Time and Knowledge, 59–63, and Flint, Divine Providence, 84.

20. This way of conceptualizing it I owe to the “many-stage” version of simple foreknowledge in Zimmerman, “The Providential Usefulness of Simple Foreknowledge.” Hunt, in “Divine Providence and Simple Foreknowledge,” has ...