Recently in Free Will Category

Plantinga defines strong actualization thus: "God strongly actualizes a state of affairs S if and only if he causes S to be actual and causes to be actual every contingent state of affairs S* such that S includes S*" (Profiles, p. 49).

It is crucial for Plantinga's arguments that "includes" have an interpretation such that if S entails S* and S* is contingent, then S includes S*. Otherwise, Plantinga's FWD includes an invalid argument. For Plantinga is going to argue that if W is a world where Eve freely doesn't take the apple, then T(W)--the maximal strongly actualized state of affairs that includes all the states of affairs strongly actualized in W--does not include Eve's freely refraining from taking the apple, and hence the conditional T(W)→(Eve freely refrains from taking the apple) cannot be necessarily true. But the latter only follows if entailment implies inclusion.

Moreover, it is crucial to the FWD that God cannot strongly actualize a state of affairs of someone doing something freely.

But now we have a problem. For suppose that in some world W where Eve freely doesn't take the apple, God earlier confidentially remarks to the Archangel Gabriel that if Eve doesn't freely refrain, God will create life on Pluto. Let S1 be the state of affairs of God making that remark to Gabriel, and let S2 be the state of affairs of there being no life on Pluto. Suppose S2, as well as S1, obtains at W. It seems that God strongly actualizes S1 and that God strongly actualizes S2.

But now we have a problem, for God strongly actualizes each of two states of affairs whose conjunction entails Eve's freely refaining. Now it either is or is not true that if God strongly actualizes each of two states of affairs, he strongly actualizes their conjunction. If it is true, then it follows, contrary to what is needed for the FWD, that God strongly actualizes Eve's freely refraining. If it is not true, then T(W) need not in general exist--there will, perhaps, always be a state of affairs that includes all the states of affairs strongly actualized at W, but that state of affairs will not itself be strongly actualized by God (why? becuase that state of affairs will include S1 and will include S2, but the conjunction of S1 and S2 is not strongly actualized). And Plantinga's argument seems to require the existence of T(W).

I recently finished Robert Adams' old article "The Virtue of Faith" (chapter 1 of the book The Virtue of Faith), and I found a really interesting point. Uncertainty and faith are necessary for a certain sort of special good in a relationship. I think it's worth quoting Adams on this:

In my earlier post, I gave a Grim Reaper based argument against an infinite past. Here I want to give two more arguments. Unlike the earlier argument, these two arguments are not going to be useful for arguing for the existence of God, since they make use of premises that the atheist is likely to deny (in one case, a version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and in the other, the existence of God). But they are useful in a broader sense, namely they help show what might be wrong with an infinite past.

Argument 1. If there is an infinite past, we could imagine that each January 1 in the infinite past somebody looks around and checks if there are any rabbits. If there are, she does nothing. If there aren't, she makes a breeding pair. Of course, once a breeding pair of rabbits exists, there will be rabbits forever. Nobody and nothing but one of these potential rabbit-makers makes a rabbit. The setup entails that there have always been rabbits, and the rabbits have not been made by anybody or anything, contrary to a causal version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.

Argument 2. If there is an infinite past, the following scenario should be possible. The universe contains nothing but bobs, and at no time is there more than one. A bob is an asexually reproducing person who lives for a century. At the end of the century he dies, but at the end of his existence he has a choice whether to reproduce or not, and can choose either way. If he freely chooses to reproduce, a new bob comes into existence out of the old bob's body after death. So, this is a universe where every bob has always chosen to reproduce, though they could have chosen otherwise. But now consider the following very plausible Thesis:
(*) Necessarily, if a world contains at least one contingent being, then there exists something in that world determined into existence by God's will.
But the story in Argument 2 seems to violate (*), since each bob's existence is partly dependent on the free choice of the preceding bob. Maybe God has determined, then, not the fact that there is a bob, but that there is some initial infinite sequence of bobs, without determining which initial infinite sequence there is. But even that there is an initial infinite sequence of bobs already depends on bob-made choices.

Argument 2 won't impress theological compatibilists.

The doctrine that God is identical with his nature has traditionally been defended by Christians, and would be useful for responding to the following argument (defended by Quentin Smith, Wes Morriston, etc.):

(*) The best answers to the problem of evil all involve significant libertarian freedom; but significant libertarian freedom is not something God has (because he cannot do wrong); a freedom that God does not have is not the most valuable kind of freedom; therefore, significant libertarian freedom is not the most valuable kind of freedom.

The challenge this argument presents is to come up with a reason to think either (a) that significant libertarian freedom is valuable in us, but would not be valuable in the case of God because of some relevant difference between us and God, or (b) that God has a kind of freedom which is more valuable than significant libertarian freedom, but it is a freedom that we cannot have. Both kinds of responses (actually, they may not be very different) require the identification of a disanalogy between us and God. One proposed disanalogy is that God is identical with his nature, while we are not. Therefore, actions that are necessitated by God's nature are rooted precisely in God. But we are not identical with our natures, and hence any actions that were necessitated by our nature would be rooted in something outside of us, contrary to source incompatibilism.

One of the next moves in the dialectic (Wes Morriston does this) is to question the coherence of the doctrine of divine simplicity that the identity of God with God's nature is based on, giving standard objections such as asking how God's attributes could be identical (e.g., how could God's omnipotence be identical with God's mercy?) However, although I have tried to answer such objections, I think this is not how the present dialectic should go. For the doctrine that God is identical with God's nature is not the doctrine of divine simplicity--it is only one of the entailments of the doctrine of divine simplicity. Thus, it is prima facie possible to defend the identity of God with God's nature without defending the doctrine of divine simplicity. Perhaps in the end one can derive divine simplicity from the identity of God with God's nature. But those are going to metaphysically controversial arguments.

So, how might one defend the identity of God and his nature? Well, let's ask what the alleged difficulty in that identity is. I see three metaphysical difficulties, actually: (1) Could anything be identical to its nature? (2) Even if so, could anything concrete be identical to its nature? (3) Even if so, could anything causally efficacious be identical to its nature?

1. If Libertarianism about the will is true then none of our decisions is causally determined by any previous physical or mental event(s) (or state(s)).

2. If none of our decisions is causally determined by any previous physical or mental event(s) (or state(s)) then there is always a possibility that even the most recalcitrant rejecter, R, of divine reconciliation may, at some time in the future, tF, freely choose to be reconciled to God.

3. Therefore if God sustains R in existence until tF, then R will be freely reconciled to God.

4. Furthermore, It is no cost to an omnipotent God to sustain R in existence until tF.

5. So then, God if God desires that everyone is freely reconciled to him, then he will sustain everyone in existence until they freely choose to be reconciled to him.

6. God does desire that everyone is freely reconciled to him.

7. Thus everyone is freely reconciled to God. (i.e, Universalism is true).

This argument for Universalism about salvation subsumes libertarian freedom as a premise. Libertarians, like Jerry Walls and Bill Craig, typically argue that Universalism conflicts with Libertarianism. They seem to think that human beings can delude themselves in such a way that they will never, ever, be freely reconciled to God, and any attempt on God's part to shatter their illusions and reconcile with them would have to violate their autonomy in order to succeed. This strikes me as odd. After all, if they truly are free in the libertarian sense, their iterated persistence in their own delusion cannot be taken as a certain datum. Surely their freedom, if it is genuine, must include the freedom to come to their senses. So it seems that only if the libertarian denies libertarian freedom can they actually assert that humans could persist forever in rejecting God.

Let (R) be the denial of moral defeatism. I’m worried about the truth of (R) quite apart from God’s existence, so assume the possible moral responses in (R) do not include divine responses.

R. For any evil E that occurs, there is a possible response R to E such that R is a free moral response to E, R is impossible in the absence of E, the moral value of (R & E) is (neutral or) positive.

I include of course any evil E that is occurring, has occurred or will occur. The denial of (R) is the position that there exists some evil to which every possible moral response is defeated. That is, every possible moral response is such that (R & E) is negative. By free moral responses to evil I have in mind actions (individual and collective) that display moral courage, charity, perseverance, compassion, care, hope, mercy, generosity, justice and the like. Some well-known exemplars of free moral responsiveness include M. Gandhi, M. L. King, Mother Teresa, among, of course, many others. These individuals display what is possible in the way of free moral responses to evil. Now consider (P1) and (P2).

P1. If moral defeatism is false, then the existence of gratuitous evil depends largely on what we freely choose to do.

P2. If moral defeatism is true, then there is (was, will be) some evil E such that there is nothing anyone (or any group) could ever do, over any amount of time, in response to E that is not defeated by E.

One of the problems with accepting Christian universalism is that in doing so it seems that one must give up on a libertarian notion of freedom of the will. This is due to the classic Arminian objection that a being could not really be free unless it were possible for that being to resist the will of God--that she be saved--for all eternity. Thus the denizens of Hell are said to be there as a result of their ongoing rejection of the Almighty. The universalist, contra the Arminian, holds that Hell is essentially purgative and restorative, and thus only temporary, and that ultimately everyone is reconciled to God. But then, if everyone is ultimately reconciled with God, it seems to follow that no one possesses libertarian freedom. After all, no one can choose to be permanently separated from God.

I've been thinking for a little while about two related arguments for compatibilism based on Christian theology. In this post, I'll look at the implications of the traditional approach to the Incarnation, and in a second post I'll look at what the kind of robust view of inspiration that I favor will require. I'm cross-posting this at my personal blog.

It seems to me that with the traditional understanding of the Incarnation, something like compatibilism must be true of Jesus' freedom. The traditional view of the Incarnation is that Jesus is fully God and fully human, and his divine nature prevents him from doing anything sinful, but at least in his earthly life he had all the human ability to do so, being fully tempted in every way. This means that we need some sense in which it's possible that Jesus do something wrong and some sense in which it's not. The best way I know of that anyone has captured this is to say that it was possible for Jesus to do wrong in relation to his human nature but not possible in relation to his divine nature.

But what does that mean? If it means that two natures constrain him, and one allows it while the other doesn't, then it just implies that it's not possible for him to have sinned. His human nature would have allowed it, but the divine nature prevented it. This seems just like the situation for someone with no legs: it's possible for them to walk with respect to their brain but not possible for them to walk with respect to their legs. So it's simply just not possible for them to walk, unless it's ever proper to ignore the obstacle sufficient for preventing that possibility, and it pretty much never is unless you're talking about attaching new legs or something like that. But there's no such analogous possibility with Jesus, as if he could lose his divine nature. So this doesn't well capture the intuition that there's some sense in which Jesus could have sinned, in order to explain the statements about his having been genuinely tempted. This complaint strikes me as much like the complaint that libertarians on free will offer against compatibilism.

The analogy of God as the author and us as his characters has a venerable history. Here I want to object to one use of the analogy as a way of resolving the tension between providence and creaturely causation, deterministic and especially indeterministic. The puzzles the analogy is addressing are like this:

1. How can it be that horses evolved fully under the influence of random stochastic processes, and yet we can also explain the existence of horses in terms of the way they glorify God?
2. How is it that Francine freely chose to accept baptism in the name of the most holy Trinity, and yet the choice was entirely caused by God's grace?

The suggestion made is that in these cases there are two entirely non-competing explanations. The case is parallel to the way that an event in a story can be explained both in terms of the author's activity, plans and motivations, and in terms of in-story causal processes. Thus, there is no conflict between:

3. Colonel Mustard was murdered because the author believed that books about murdered colonial colonels sell well.
4. Colonel Mustard was murdered because he knew that Captain Catsup was not as great a tiger hunter in India as he claimed to be.

It would be a mistake to give (3) as the explanation when solving the mystery, except in a post-modern sort of novel--think of the absurdity of the great detective in the novel getting everybody in a room together, and then saying (3).

This use of the author analogy is mistaken for a simple reason. The "because" in (4) is in the scope of a fictionalizing operator. What (4) really says is:

5. According to the story (Colonel Mustard was murdered because he knew that Captain Catsup was not as great a tiger hunter in India as he claimed to be).

And "According to the story" is a truth-canceling operator. The "because" in (5) is within the scope of that truth-canceling operator, and hence does not provide an explanation.

I've been thinking what open future (OF) views can say about the modality of statements about the future. There are two OF semantics, which I'll call N and F. Suppose Curley now exists, and that Curley's freely taking the bribe is open. On the N semantics, Curley will freely take the bribe is neither true nor false. On the F semantics, it is false that Curley will freely take the bribe. The N semantics requires denial of excluded middle. The F semantics requires denial of the principle that, basically, not(will(p)) iff will(not(p)).

Suppose now that we say that a proposition p possibly/necessarily/impossibly is V iff p is V in some/all/no worlds, where V is a truth value or a logical combination of truth values like "neither true nor false", which I will abbreviate "ntnf". Let p be the proposition that Curley will freely take the bribe. On the F semantics, p is false in every world. For in some worlds Curley's freely taking the bribe is open, and in those worlds p is false by that semantics. And in all other worlds, it is determined that Curley won't freely take the bribe (e.g., because it is determined that there is no Curley, or that nobody will ever offer Curley a bribe, or whatever). So, in every world, p is false, and so p is necessarily false.

On the N semantics, things are more interesting. In worlds where Curley's freely taking the bribe is open, p is ntnf. In worlds where Curley's freely taking the bribe is not open, p is false. Therefore, on the N semantics, p is possibly ntnf and possibly false, and necessarily not true.

So what's wrong with this? Well, one thing is that as Geoff Pynn pointed out in the previous discussion of open futurism, the open futurist surely wants to say that p is a "future contingent". But if p is necessarily false, as it is on the F semantics, then that's endangered. And if p is necessarily not true, then it's also in a bit of trouble.

Dennett (see Vallicella's discussion here) discusses an argument rather like the following, and criticizes it for being like an argument starting with the assumptions that every mammal has a mammal for a mother, and there was a finite number of mammals. But nonetheless, the argument strikes me very plausible:

1. If E is a mental state or decision that I am responsible for to any degree, then either I, as libertarian cause, am among E's causes, or else a mental state or decision that I am to some (perhaps different) degree responsible for is among E's causes, or both.
2. I have had only finitely many mental states and have made only finitely many decisions.
3. Nothing is a cause of itself, and there are no causal circles.
4. Therefore, if I am responsible for any mental state or decision, I have engaged in libertarian causation.

(Here, I understand "libertarian causation" as agent causation or any reasonably similar libertarian substitute, such as Kane's.)

One could try to get out of the argument by positing an infinite number of past mental states and/or decisions. I think that would not be plausible, not just because of the implausibility of the infinitary posit, but because it wouldn't get at the heart of the worry.

It seems very plausible that a good answer to the problem of evil will require some version of the Free Will Defense (FWD). If a FWD requires incompatibilism, then there is a very plausible argument from theism to incompatibilism.
But I think it may well be that a FWD does not require incompatibilism. First of all, a FWD does not need that freedom of will and responsibility be incompatible with determination by prior non-agential causes or by laws of nature. At most what we need for a FWD is that freedom be incompatible with total determination by prior agential causes (the case that matters is that of God's creative act), a claim that I think some compatibilists will accept.
Second, even if freedom of will and responsibility are compatible with determination by divine agency, it does not follow that the FWD is completely out of steam. For it may be that certain kinds of good decisions depend on some of their value on something more than bare freedom of will and responsibility. For instance, for a promise to be valid, more is needed than that the object of the promise be good and that the promise be made with freedom of will and responsibility. A promise made at gunpoint is invalid, even if it is made responsibly and with freedom of will (one does, after all, have a free choice whether to utter the promise or to die, assuming one does not lose freedom and responsibility through panic, but this is not enough for validity).
Here would be one sketch of a FWD that is compatible with compatibilism (even compatiblism between freedom and responsibility, and determination by an agential cause): A love is of much greater value when the lover is not causally determined by the beloved to love the beloved. This claim is compatible with saying that the lover could freely and responsibly respond with love to the beloved even if determined to do so--for there is more that we want in a response to love than mere freedom and responsibility (e.g., someone with amazing powers of self-control could freely and responsibly respond with love to a threat, but that's not the most valuable kind of loving response). But a failure to respond with love to God's love is always an evil. But it might be that the only way God could ensure that there are agents all of whom respond with love to God's love is by causally determining them to do so. (One way to argue for this is to suppose Molinism transworld unresponsiveness: In every feasible world in which agents are not determined by God to respond with love to his love, some agent fails to do so.) It might then be that God is justified in creating creatures some of whom fail to respond with love to his love.
But while this example shows that a FWD need not require the incompatibility between determination and freedom/responsibility, this FWD still requires the compatibility between freedom/responsibility and lack of determination--it requires the possibility of libertarian-type choices. (Hume thinks that freedom requires determination. Fischer, on the other hand, is an even-handed compatibilist--freedom is compatible with determination adnw ith lack thereof.)