Through a generous grant from the Templeton Foundation, I'm pleased to announce a writing retreat and workshop that I'm hosting next spring on 'Divine Freedom'. Details of the retreat can be found here: http://people.nnu.edu/ktimpe/research/flyer.pdf
To apply, send a no more than two page letter of interest and a CV via email.
If there are any questions, please do not hesitate to email me.
The latest batch of notifications coming out of Mele's Big Questions in Free Will grants includes the winners for the 2011-2012 theology of free will grants. And ll three of the winners are philosophers!
David Hunt, "Freedom and Foreknowledge: Divine and Human Agency without Alternative Possibilities."
Brian Leftow, "Divine Freedom."
Hugh McCann, "Free Will for Theists: The Theology of Freedom."
Congratulations, you three!
A number of theologians and philosophers make the claim, implicitly if not explicitly, that having free will is essential to human nature. This is, perhaps, a fairly natural claim, particularly if one thinks that free will is a capacity of the human soul. But the claim got me thinking, as there may be a counterexample.
The first potential counterexample will depend on the details of what one's view of free will is. Consider, for example, John Fischer's view according to which free will requires a certain level of ability to recognize and respond to moral reasons. But then what about psycopaths, who are incapable of recognizing and/or being moved by certain sorts of moral reasons, namely those that pertain to the good of other individuals? Even if psycopathy renders individuals who suffer from it not morally responsible, it would seem odd if they weren't human. Now, perhaps psycopathy at most takes away certain aspects of one's ability to recognize or be moved by certain moral reasons, but it leaves one's abilitty to recognize and be moved by other kinds of moral reasons intact. So perhaps what psycopathy does is limit the range of one's free will, but doesn't diminish it all together.
The second potential type of counterexample is young children. My daughter is currently only ten months old, and I strongly doubt she has either the volitional or intellectual capabilities for free will, although she likely will once she reaches a certain age. In response to this, perhaps one could say that what is essential to humans is not the actual having of free will, but the capacity to have free will.
But finally, consider those humans who have genetic disorders that strongly impair their intellectual and/or volitional capacities. Such individuals may not reach the level of these capacities needed for free will even once fully grown. Nor, given their genetic disorders, does it look like even have the capacity for free will in the way suggested regarding young children.
So it looks like the claim the free will is essential to human nature is false.
Seems that describing it as "shameless self-promotion" absolves one, though I doubt it. But that's the line so I hereby use it, whatever purgatory consequences... My new collection, in draft form, LaTeX'ed to beautiful purposes by Oxford's document class, is here.
Any thoughts welcome, of course--would love to minimize the errors!
Some of you may have seen the announcement on Philosophy Updates, but in case you haven't (or as a reminder):
On December 11th, 2010, the University of California, Riverside and the University of California, Irvine will co-sponsor a conference in honor of Nelson Pike. It will be held at UCI, and the speakers will be:
It should be good times, so please save the date! Stay tuned for more details as they develop, or feel free to contact John Fischer.
And, as an added bonus, only for Prosblogion readers,* to get you pumped for the conference, check out this re-reading of Pike's argument from the aforementioned John Fischer (along with his co-authors Patrick Todd and Neal Tognazzini).
* Not really—but it is difficult to find online.
Ari: Consider this horrific theology: God forces Sally to sin, in a way that takes away her responsibility, and then he intentionally causes eternal torment to her.
Cal: I thought you were smarter than that. That isn't Calvinist theology! Calvinism holds that God intentionally causes people to sin in a way that retains their responsibility, and then punishes some of them.
Ari: I didn't say it was a Calvinist theology. You agree that this is a horrific theology, I take it?
Cal: Yes, of course.
Ari: Why?
Cal: Because God is punishing an innocent.
Ari: I said nothing about punishment. I said God intentionally caused eternal torment. I didn't say that the torment was a punishment.
Cal: How does that make it not be horrific?
Begin with this plausible principle:
But now add these premises:
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?
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.
