Fate and Free Will: A Defense of Theological Determinism

Introduction

Traditional theism posits a deity possessing all perfections—all possible power, all possible knowledge, perfect justice and love—one who is Creator and Lord of the universe. There are many puzzles about the coherence of this conception.

One of the more obvious puzzles centers on human freedom. Can human beings have free will if they live in a universe governed by a god like this? We might sharpen this question in two different ways. One has to do with divine foreknowledge, in particular God’s knowledge of our future actions. How can humans be free if God knows what we will do? This question has received quite a lot of attention in the past few decades. While it is not an easy question to answer, I believe there are a number of feasible routes the traditional theist might take in trying to answer it.¹

The second puzzle has to do with God’s providence—his wise and good ordering of the world. I view this puzzle as technically harder, philosophically more interesting, and theologically more pressing. Perhaps just because it is harder, it has received less attention in the literature than the first problem. On the one hand, the religious believer wishes to trust that God has arranged even the details of life in wise and good ways, and this requires that God have sovereignty, or control, over even the details. The more details the believer wishes to be able to trust God with, the more sovereignty over details she will need to believe that God possesses. On the other hand, she may wish to have some exercise of free will, and this requires that she have some control (sovereignty) over at least aspects of her own life. Yet, on the face of it, control is a zero-sum game: to say that I am free with respect to this or that means I have control over it, and insofar as I have control, God lacks it. And vice versa: whatever aspects of the universe God controls are, due to that fact alone, not under the control of my free will. So how can humans be free if God is sovereign over their actions? But if God is not sovereign over human actions, then how can we be confident that God has ordered the world wisely and well? And if we cannot be confident that God has ordered every aspect of the world wisely and well—because human beings have the power to mess up at least bits of it—doesn’t God lack a power that a maximally perfect being would have?

This problem of divine providence, or sovereignty, and human freedom connects quite closely with another longstanding question for theism, the problem of evil. It is not ridiculous to observe the many and serious evils of this world and conclude that, in fact, it is not arranged wisely and well by a provident God. The horrors, tragedies, and disasters that regularly sweep through corners of this planet provide powerful evidence—so it has been argued—that no powerful, knowledgeable, just and loving God rules it. One longstanding move in this debate is the appeal to free will: God has not wrecked the joint; we have, through the misuse of our divinely granted free will. This appeal, however, raises further questions. If we humans have been given the power to wreak havoc around us (especially on other humans), doesn’t that mean that God is no longer in control of his creation? Whereas, if God is in control of the evils that we do, how has the appeal to free will done anything to solve the original problem of evil? Or, in other words, if we wish to preserve God’s moral uprightness, his love and justice, it seems we will have to curtail his sovereignty, perhaps by saying he has ceded some of it to human beings in the form of their free will. On the other hand, if we wish to preserve God’s sovereignty it seems we must temper our estimate of his goodness. Neither alternative is particularly attractive for theists of a traditional stripe.

I think it is fair to say that theistic analytic philosophers of the last generation have thought human freedom very important to defend. Moreover, they have generally defended it in a particular version: namely, libertarian free will, according to which, if one performs a free action, it is possible not to have done it, and possible in the strongest sense. The libertarian claims that nothing and no one, including God, can determine whether we do or don’t perform a particular action, if we perform it (or refrain from doing so) freely. Because of the absolutely untrammeled nature of libertarian free actions, libertarian free will lends itself most readily to the zero-sum conception of control: what control we have, God lacks, and what control God has, we lack. To the extent that I am exercising my free will, God does not decide what happens; to the extent that God is exercising his free will, I do not freely decide what happens.² So the general tendency to emphasize libertarian free will in analytic philosophy of religion has a reciprocal effect, namely, a general tendency to conceive of God as exercising somewhat less providential control than the majestic sovereign of the universe that traditional theism posits.

This book will break the other way. In it I wish to make the best case I can for theological determinism. Theological determinism (TD from here on) is, roughly—more precision will be forthcoming presently—the view that God’s power should not be viewed as at all limited by anything contingent, including exercises of human freedom. God’s sovereignty is maximal, and his will determines everything that happens down to the smallest detail. One consequence of TD is that, whatever kind of free will we have, it is not libertarian. More generally, whatever kind of freedom or responsibility we have, it must be compatible with complete and absolute determinism by the divine will.

Rejecting libertarian free will has a number of consequences that, to be brief, have been thought to be so devastating that the position cannot be sustained by an intellectually responsible and morally sensitive theist. Nevertheless, I have become convinced that the objections to TD are less powerful than they have been made out to be. Furthermore, TD of some species or other is a hardy perennial in the tradition of theistic reflection, and it has the weight behind it of some powerful arguments that have not been widely appreciated. It is these arguments and replies to objections that I aim to set forth in the following chapters.

In recent decades, TD has been discussed (when discussed at all) most often under the rubric of the problem of human freedom and divine fore-knowledge. However, divine foreknowledge is not the primary focus of TD. Philosophers who worry about the paradox of human freedom and divine foreknowledge often have little to say about the paradox of human freedom and divine providence or sovereignty. TD, however, yields clear answers to both puzzles. It also makes contributions to answers to questions about divine and human freedom and responsibility, doctrines of heaven and hell, divine justice and love, and other topics. It involves a wide-ranging and well-integrated set of commitments, which is the first positive thing one might want to say about it.

THE THESIS AND SOME CONSEQUENCES OF IT

I characterized TD before in terms of divine power and sovereignty, but here, being precise, I present a more specific view about how that power and sovereignty are exercised. TD is of course a form of determinism. Determinism is a form of conditional necessity: it must be the case that, given these facts or events over here, some other fact obtains or event occurs over there. There are various kinds of determinisms, and we can slice them along three different dimensions: (1) what does the determining, (2) what is determined, and (3) what the modality of the must is. So, for example, Laplacean physical determinism holds that, given a physical state of the universe, other subsequent states of the universe must occur, and the must here has the strength of natural law. This form of determinism had a lot going for it when Newtonian physics was state of the art, and it influenced a great deal of subsequent philosophy. Psychological determinism might come in various flavors, but one common idea is that, given certain mental states in an agent, certain actions will subsequently follow, with a modality that includes a ceteris paribus clause in order to account for various kinds of external interference with the agent. The Enlightenment determinist Baron d’Holbach believed we always and necessarily follow our strongest desire, but the necessity he envisioned did not cover events like having a piano dropped on one’s head.³

It is a further requirement of determinism that the determining facts be explanatorily prior to the determined facts. For example, suppose there is a one-to-one correspondence between possible past and possible future states of affairs. In that case, it is just as true to say that, given a particular future, a particular past must have occurred as it is to say the reverse. Still, we would want to say (regarding this scenario) that the past determines the future, but not vice versa, since we think the explanations provided by physical causes run from past to future but not vice versa. (If time travel is possible, things get more complex.)

Obviously this could get complicated, but fortunately, TD is a rather simple kind of determinism. The determining factor is God’s will, and the determined facts are every other contingent state of affairs. The modality is metaphysical necessity. Before offering a definition of TD, however, let me make a few remarks about God’s will.

Strictly speaking, one could hold to TD and also hold that God’s will determined both contingent and necessary facts. This is the position taken by McCann, for example.⁴ While interesting, this is not a position I will explore. Instead, I will just take logical-cum-metaphysical necessities as given. It makes no difference, though, to the main ideas at stake: if you are attracted to this view, just say that God’s will determines every state of affairs, necessary and contingent, and proceed accordingly.

One might also hold to TD and claim that the divine will is not contingent, being determined by the perfection of the divine nature. This is Leibniz’s route, that God necessarily wills the best of all possible worlds, and in this view there are, properly speaking, no contingencies. This is another optional commitment for TD, and not one that I am terribly attracted to, but it, too, can be handled easily enough for those interested. Leibniz distinguished a particular type of necessity, moral necessity, which he claimed governed God’s choice of the best. Non–moral necessities would be what contemporary philosophers ordinarily think of as metaphysical necessities, things like cats are mammals or 2 + 2 = 4. Moral necessities are determined by God’s will (itself determined by the perfection of God’s nature), while non–moral necessities are not. If you are attracted to this view, then instead of saying that God’s will determines all the (other) contingent facts, say that God’s will determines all the morally necessary facts. Where the positions or arguments in this book appeal to contingency, substitute moral necessity. The Leibnizian option will require a little more discussion later in the book, but for the purposes of defining TD, we can leave it there.

Finally, one could hold, allegedly with Descartes, that God’s will can perform impossibilities. This has the well-known peculiar consequence that God can make a rock so big he cannot lift it, and then lift it anyway. This and similar nonsensicalities have convinced me and many others that this idea is not worth pursuing. My position will be the fairly standard one that God’s will is contingent, and I shall take no view on the determination of necessities, though closely related varieties of TD could modify either of these commitments with most of the rest of the argument coming out intact.

So, for precision,

Theological determinism: (1) the facts about God’s will entail every other contingent fact, and (2) the facts about God’s will are explanatorily prior to every other contingent fact.

It follows immediately that the contents of God’s will, plus necessary truths, are a complete explanation of all other facts or events. By complete explanation I mean one in which the explanandum is entailed by the (complete) explanans, that is, one in which it is impossible for the explanans to hold and the explanandum not to hold. TD claims that any given contingent event can be completely explained—is entailed by—the contents of God’s will plus necessary truths.⁵ Such an explanation may be extremely circuitous but nevertheless obtains.

Therefore, TD rules out the possibility that other contingent factors that are not caused, at however distant a remove, by the divine will could play a role in giving explanations of events. For instance, if disaster strikes, there are no human choices, demonic agencies, or random natural occurrences that explain it unless these, too, are completely explained by the contents of God’s will.

Likewise, according to TD, the only contingent facts without complete explanations—the only ultimate or brute contingencies, one might say—are facts about God’s will.⁶ In particular, contingent facts about human wills, about what humans would freely choose in such-and-such circumstances, or about other events in the creation, like coin flips or gamma rays, are not ultimately or brutely contingent in that they can be explained, completely, as the results of what God willed.

This, in turn, means that God’s will is maximally specific. He wills to create not a man (some man, any man) but a man with exactly these properties. He does not intend to bless an individual somehow, or to have him wind up blessed sometime, but he wills to bless an individual in some completely specific way and time. Nothing is left to chance; nothing lies outside his providence. TD’s commitment to the maximal specificity of the divine will rules out the view expressed by van Inwagen: I prefer to think that God is capable of decreeing that a certain indefinite condition be satisfied without decreeing any of the indifferent alternative states of affairs that would satisfy it.⁷ I will offer some arguments in favor of the maximally specific view, versus van Inwagen’s alternative, a little later. For now, however, I am simply trying to make TD’s commitments clear.

TD does not say that God intends to happen all that happens. Just as we do in the case of human wills, in the case of God’s will we must distinguish between intended and merely foreseen consequences of the divine will. TD is compatible with some contingent facts or events being fore-seen but unintended.⁸

Likewise, it is tempting to hold that, according to TD, every contingent event that occurs is made to occur by God and every contingent fact is made the case by God. There is an innocent, commonsensical sense in which I think this is unexceptionable, but for some purposes we need to be careful. Suppose I go to a café, notice that Pierre is not there, and then go home and mournfully draw a picture of the café sans Pierre. I noticed the absence of Pierre, but have I drawn the absence of Pierre? There is a case for a negative answer: drawing Pierre’s absence amounts to just not drawing Pierre, while noticing Pierre’s absence goes beyond not noticing Pierre. If we think of what God does or makes the case as, so to speak, drawing the creation as a whole, we may want to reserve this language for the positive realities of the creation, not the negative absences.

Even if we want to say that God does everything, this does not mean that God is the sole agent in the universe or that other agents do not act. There are other agents, and they do act, which is to say that their wills are effective. But TD says that their willings, and the efficacy of those willings, are events that are entailed by, and explanatorily posterior to, God’s will.

Theological Determinism contra Libertarianism

A final aspect of TD we should get clear about is that, according to it, while there may be events undetermined by mundane causes, there are no earthly events undetermined by any causes. In particular, there may be human actions that are not determined by any antecedent physical or psychological states, but there are no (contingent) human actions that are undetermined by anything whatsoever, because God’s will determines everything contingent. Libertarianism is usually defined as the conjunction of the claims that (a) human beings sometimes act freely and (b) free actions are incompatible with any kind of determinism. Thus, since TD is a form of determinism, it rules out libertarianism immediately.⁹

We can go a bit further, because there are different motivations for libertarianism, or rather for the incompatibilism that makes up its second clause. What is perhaps the more familiar strand of incompatibilism, lee-way incompatibilism, is motivated by the idea that acting freely requires being able to do otherwise.¹⁰ This idea is often referred to as the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP). A large number of principles have been defended under this name, all of them sharing a family resemblance, and the following seems to be a fair candidate for inclusion in the family:

PAP: S does A freely only if, given all the facts not in S’s control, it is possible for S to do otherwise than A.

More recently, however, some incompatibilists have downplayed or entirely denied the importance of being able to do otherwise. They advocate a different motivation for their source incompatibilism, namely, that acting freely requires being, in some sense, the ultimate cause or source of one’s action. It is not easy to pin down what an ultimate cause or source is, and, as we shall see, there are, importantly, different ideas about what source incompatibilism amounts to among its advocates. However, it is fair to say that a necessary condition for being an ultimate cause or source requires that there not be any sufficient conditions for the occurrence of one’s action that are outside of one’s control. Call this condition SRC.

SRC: S does A freely only if there are no sufficient conditions for S doing A such that S has no control over whether those conditions obtain.

Both PAP and SRC include the idea of facts or conditions that S does not control. Control is a tricky concept, but if whether some fact obtains is explanatorily prior to any facts about one’s choices, desires, decisions, and so on, then pretty clearly that fact is not in one’s control. Since TD holds that the facts about God’s will are explanatorily prior to any other contingent facts, which presumably include facts about human beings’ choices, desires, decisions, and so on, TD also holds that the facts about God’s will are not in any human being’s control.

It follows that TD is incompatible with either flavor of libertarian free action. It rules out leeway-incompatibilist free action because, given the facts about God’s will, over which S is not in control, it is not possible for S to do anything other than what she in fact does. And it rules out source-incompatibilist free action because there are sufficient conditions for S doing A, namely the facts about God’s will, over which S has no control.

The same basic motivations—the leeway appeal versus the source-hood appeal—motivate incompatibilism about moral responsibility as well as free action, and the same consequences of TD would apply. Thus TD is committed to either skepticism (hard determinism) about free will and moral responsibility or to compatibilism about them, or to some combination of the two (e.g., semi-compatibilism). Ultimately, my preferred version of TD will advocate compatibilism about both concepts, but those arguments lie ahead.

THE SCOPE OF THE ARGUMENT

This book defends TD from within the perspective of a fairly traditional, orthodox Christianity. The issues involved are central for Christians, but similar issues will arise for adherents of other branches of the Abrahamic family tree and maybe beyond that. Indeed, the framework within which the book works is not Christian in the sense of depending on special doctrines about Jesus of Nazareth. It is probably better to say that this is a Christian framework in the sense that it includes doctrines about God and related matters that have emerged over the long history of reflection on such matters in the Christian tradition. I make no claims, and have no interest in making claims, that such a framework is in any sense exclusive to Christianity.

The traditional, orthodox Christianity will be assumed, not argued for. That is, my ambition does not include a proof for the existence of God, rebuttals to arguments against the coherence of the traditional conception of God (except as these arguments touch on TD), or clarifications of various other conceptual difficulties in Christianity or theism more generally.

Also, TD comes in different varieties. I aim to defend the general position by defending what I view as its most attractive instantiation. So it is probably best to construe the large argument I am making as an argument for the (attractive) coherence of a particular version of TD within a Christian perspective, both supported and explained by aspects of that wider perspective and supporting and explaining other aspects of it. Alternatively, you can think of this work as a conditional argument for the rational acceptability of TD: if we grant all these other commitments, then at least one version of TD fits well with them and can meet its most important challenges.

My traditional, orthodox Christianity has six main elements. Four of them comprise standard philosophical theism:

• Omnipotence. God can do anything it is possible to do.

• Omniscience. God knows all truths and believes no falsehoods.

• Perfect goodness, or moral perfection. God’s will cannot be improved.

• Creation ex nihilo. God created the universe out of nothing.

Take each of those characterizations as a rough cut at describing the associated concept—more precision will be forthcoming where necessary. The argument of this book will show that TD supports particularly strong, unqualified forms of omnipotence and omniscience; that TD coheres well with a strong, unqualified form of creation ex nihilo; and it will spend a great deal of time rebutting charges that TD is incompatible with God’s moral perfection.

To make parts of the argument, I will supplement the four very standard elements just presented with two more. The first is

• Eternity. God is not in time, and events in his life do not occur in temporal sequence. Rather, as Boethius has it, God’s existence is the complete, simultaneous, and perfect possession of everlasting life; his life is all at once, a complete present.

Divine eternity is more controversial than the other four characteristics, and there are conceptual puzzles about it (as there are about the other four).¹¹ But, because I do not find the puzzles terribly puzzling, and because divine eternity is part of the mainstream tradition of Western theism, I feel comfortable relying on it for parts of my argument.

Finally, I shall draw on

• A robust Christian eschatology, particularly the doctrines of heaven and hell.

A well-known article characterizes true moral responsibility as the sort of responsibility that would make sense of heaven and hell.¹² In a Christian context, this is no mere metaphor or useful thought experiment; it is actually what TD has to make sense of. As a result, vague and naïve ideas about heaven and hell will not do. The versions of the doctrines that I will draw on are not universally accepted among Christians or theists more generally, but neither are they idiosyncratic. The argument will not be pushing the boundaries of tradition, orthodoxy, or theism with these conceptions of heaven and hell, though it may be pushing some narrower confessional boundaries.

I said I was making an argument for the coherence of TD with a traditional orthodox Christianity. I did not say TD was more coherent with traditional orthodox Christianity than any of its competitors. I do believe it is more coherent, and it may be that my sympathetic readers will come to that conclusion by the end of the book, but I have not made it my ambition to show that.

My own position vis-à-vis the argument being made is a peculiar one, and I wish to be clear about it. This book has taken several years to write, and when I began it, I would have classified myself as one of the traditional, orthodox Christians from whose perspective the argument was being made. Even at that point, I would not have said that I believed TD, properly speaking, though it was the theistic option that I found most attractive and credible. My long-held position has been that a certain diffdence in these deep matters is appropriate, and a straightforward avowal of TD is not and never has been exactly my own perspective. Fairly late in the composition process, I decided that (for reasons mostly remote from the issues in this book) I ought to reclassify myself more along the lines of a hopeful or wishful agnostic. I still find TD the most attractive and credible theistic option, though I now find atheistic or nontraditional theistic options more credible than I used to. In the text, I have tried to put arguments and positions that are directly pro-TD in the mouths of advocates of TD or some similar characters without making the prose unduly awk-ward, while reserving the first person for arguments and positions I personally endorse.

Many people think TD suffers from devastating objections, without many offsetting attractions, and it is my primary purpose in this work to explain some of the attractions of TD while rebutting the most serious objections. In short, TD is an underappreciated theory, and I aim to raise its status. Consequently, I place the emphasis on arguments supporting or defending TD rather than on arguments attacking competing theories. That said, however, I will take opportunities to pick low-hanging fruit: where there are simple and clear points to be made about the drawbacks (at least from a theologically determinist perspective) to alternatives, I will not avoid making those points. However, such comparative argument will not be the main thrust of the work.

SOME RECENT LITERATURE

TD is not a widely popular view in the philosophy of religion today. Nevertheless, views in the neighborhood have been defended, and it is worth mentioning a sample of these publications.

Paul Helm has been a consistent defender of Reformed positions in philosophical theology for the past several decades. These include strong claims about divine sovereignty and providential control and their compatibility with human responsibility and at least some understandings of free will. All these claims are congenial to the views expressed in this work, in outline if not always in detail. For example, Helm’s view of freedom is the classically compatibilist one of doing what you want to do, which I and most philosophers working today would regard as inadequate. I have a lengthy discussion of this view in chapter 8.

Derk Pereboom is a free will and moral responsibility skeptic, which is to say, he believes human beings probably lack the conditions for genuine, basic desert moral responsibility and free will. However, he thinks that we retain the capacity for a type of responsibility that covers many of the same bases, and we are better off reformulating our ideas and practices in line with that. On top of this interesting position—which will be discussed in more depth at various points in the book —Pereboom has argued that libertarianism is not an essential, or especially useful, component of traditional theistic belief. He does not think the free will theodicy is particularly successful, and he suggests universalism about salvation.¹³

As will become apparent as the book proceeds, my views about free will and responsibility are quite complicated vis-à-vis Pereboom’s. It is probably best to leave deeper discussion for the relevant chapters. I concur with Pereboom that free will theodicies are not much use, and although I am attracted to universalism, I’m not ready to endorse (or come as close to endorsing) it as he does. All that said, Pereboom’s ideas, as much as any others, have been provocative and constructive in shaping the views I have expressed here.

Hugh McCann’s 2012 book, Creation and the Sovereignty of God, expresses a view very congenial to the one laid out in this book. McCann, too, is an advocate of TD, and he evidently comes at this view, as I do, from considerations about God’s relationship to creation. His analysis of this relationship is a little different from mine in that he thinks of God’s creative activity as being related to the creation on the model of an intention’s being related to its content. This is not a view I have pursued, but if for some reason it turns out to work better than the one suggested here, it could be incorporated into the rest of what I have to say. McCann’s work and mine share the idea of God’s eternality and a story-author metaphor for God’s relationship to creation.

There is also a significant but incomplete overlap in the ways we deal with the problem of evil. We both substantially reject Plantinga’s free will defense. McCann’s explanation of evil appeals to the idea of a greater good’s defeating evil and to soul-making, which are ideas friendly to the present work as well. McCann employs some other strategies I find less appealing: our views on why TD does not make God the author of sin, for example, differ. All in all, though, McCann has offered a creative and interesting defense of a form of TD.

Finally, I will mention Jesse Couenhaven’s recent work. Couenhaven’s work as a scholar of Augustine’s anti-Pelagian writings has led him to defend a view of freedom and responsibility that is friendly to TD. (It is not clear to me whether Couenhaven is a theological determinist.) I discuss it further in chapter 8, but the gist of his normative freedom is that the highest freedom is actuality in accord with the good. The freest freedom requires excellence.¹⁴ This is quite similar to the account of freedom put forward in this book. In particular, in Couenhaven’s view, God’s excellent character necessarily prevents him from sinning, and since freedom is at least analogical between God and human beings, freedom does not require libertarianism.

These four authors certainly do not make up a comprehensive list, and a number of other authors will be mentioned as the discussion proceeds. Nevertheless, they represent some of the creative and thoughtful work, friendly to TD, being done today.

ALTERNATIVES TO THEOLOGICAL DETERMINISM

The paradoxical tension between divine providence and sovereignty, on the one hand, and human freedom and responsibility, on the other, is very real. Philosophers and theologians have debated these issues for centuries, and at present there are four main options on the table that are broadly consistent with Christian commitments. Of these, my impression is that TD is the least popular, at least in the philosophical community, though outside that community it has wider support.¹⁵ There is also a fifth, less well articulated option that I will briefly mention. In this section I want to set out the alternatives to TD briefly. More sustained discussion will appear in later chapters.

The major live theistic alternatives to TD share the claim that not every contingent fact is entailed by the facts about God’s will. Each is designed to accommodate human libertarian free will, though they do this in different ways.

Before beginning to discuss these alternatives, let me offer a few thoughts about how to categorize the views that follow. When the four main options are discussed in the context of the problem of divine fore-knowledge, the natural division is between the first view I will mention, which denies that God knows the future exhaustively, and the other three, which accept full-blown divine foreknowledge. But foreknowledge is not center stage when we focus on the problem of divine providence and sovereignty, and for our present purposes a different division is useful. The first two views discussed are Risk-Taking views, according to which, when God created the world, he did not know exactly what he was getting into. There was some lack of control over the situation and therefore some risk involved. The third position, together with TD, is a No-Risk view, according to which God made his creative decisions with full comprehension of their consequences. I shall use this Risk-Taking/No-Risk dichotomy in the chapters ahead.

Open theism is a view relatively easy to understand. According to open theism, God simply created a world with many libertarian-free agents in it and turned them loose. Their free choices were ultimately contingent, and—the hallmark of the view—God did not know ahead of time what they would do. (A primary motivation for open theism is the conviction that, if God did know what agents were going to do ahead of time, they would not be free.) Thus they are responsible for their deeds and, to a large extent, God is not. God governs the world by controlling the nonfree aspects of creation and by being vastly more intelligent than his creatures, the way a chess grandmaster might outplay a tyro. Divine providence is exercised through God’s fantastic chessmaster skills, but open theists admit that God takes risks in creating and in further interacting with the creation, although the extent of this risk is subject to debate. Open theism is incompatible with divine eternity, and there is a vast swath of knowledge—knowledge of future contingents—that it entails that God does not know, although open theists claim that they preserve divine omniscience. Loosely speaking, open theism stands at one end of a spectrum of possible theisms, and TD is more or less diametrically opposite.

Simple foreknowledge is a view that, like open theism, regards human free choices as ultimately contingent but aims to be less revisionary to traditional theistic commitments, particularly about God’s knowledge. Like open theism, simple foreknowledge holds that humans are responsible for their deeds, and God is largely not, because humans exercise libertarian free will. However, it differs from open theism in holding that God has exhaustive knowledge of the future. The idea is that God knows what will happen, including what people will freely choose to do, but not what would happen (what people would freely do) if some other conditions had been in place, there being nothing of that sort to know. Since there are no facts about what a person would freely do if X were the case, God cannot use his fore-knowledge of their hypothetical action in deciding whether to bring about X. His foreknowledge of a free action, that is, must be explanatorily posterior to the divine decisions that eventuated in the action occurring.

Without getting too deep into the weeds, I believe simple foreknowledge offers more providential control to God than open theism, but not nearly as much as either TD or Molinism (discussed immediately below). This opinion is consistent with the judgment of David Hunt, who is the foremost advocate of the simple foreknowledge perspective.¹⁶ The deity with simple foreknowledge is still a significantly Risk-Taking deity.

Molinism, along with TD, is a No-Risk view, but its explanation of divine providence is different from TD’s. Molinism holds that there are three kinds of facts. There are (1) necessary truths and (2) contingent truths determined by God’s will, just as TD has it. But, in addition, there are (3) contingent truths not determined by God’s will, the most important of which are conditionals of creaturely freedom (CCFs). These are conditionals of the form "If X were the case, S would freely do A," which is to say that CCFs are the facts about what created agents would freely do in various circumstances. They cover all possible free actions of all possible free created agents. For instance, there is some fact about whether Abraham Lincoln would have installed a telephone in the White House if it had been invented in time. This fact is not determined by God’s will, but it is known by him.

Since CCFs do not depend for their truth values on God’s will, and God is omniscient, God knows the field of CCFs ahead of time, that is, in a way explanatorily prior to his decision to create. He can therefore foresee exactly what world will result from any set of initial conditions he might choose to create. Thus, Molinism is a No-Risk view, and it offers wide scope for divine providential control. For example, suppose it is true that if Eve were offered an apple by a snake, she would freely take and eat it. If God wishes Eve to eat such an apple, all he has to do is arrange for a snake to offer her one. On the other hand, if he wishes Eve to avoid this action, he simply sees to it that no such offer is made. In either case, God exercises providential control by managing, so to speak, what conditions free agents find themselves in rather than by making things happen directly as a result of his will, and in either case Eve acts only on her free will. This preserves both divine sovereignty and human free will.

In its original, sixteenth-century version, Molinism was designed to make sure that human beings were responsible for their deeds by granting them libertarian free will. In its twentieth-century reinvention by Plantinga, Molinism has a different emphasis, one designed to deal with the problem of evil. Here the suggestion is that the field of CCFs is narrower than one might have thought and that, as a consequence, God faces trade-offs. If he creates the initial conditions so that Eve goes right in one situation, she is guaranteed to go wrong later. The reason that Eve will go wrong is, of course, her own free choices in the antecedent circumstances, but God can arrange nothing better given the CCFs he has to work with. In this new incarnation, Molinism not only keeps human beings on the hook for their deeds by granting them libertarian free will, but it also gets God off the hook for creating a world with the evil in it that we observe.¹⁷

Although Plantinga’s Molinism is No-Risk in the sense that God can entirely foresee the consequences of his creative choices when he decides to make them, it in effect succumbs to the limited and zero-sum notion of control I mentioned in the first pages of this book. For the Molinist picture of God’s creative choice can be framed this way. Imagine that, prior to creation, the set of possible free creatures forms a union and comes to God with their employment demands. They present him with a comprehensive list, each condition of the form If you make Curley a Boston politician in 1973 and present him with a $35,000 bribe, he’ll take it. Freely! Or imagine a little differently, that they have a long list of all the possible worlds, and they have crossed off a number that they refuse to cooperate with. God, then, has to work within the boundaries his employees have set. Less picturesquely, he has to work within the boundaries of CCFs he did not choose to be saddled with. In any case, his providential control is less than total.

The theological determinist disagrees with the Molinist in three important areas. First, he does not believe there are any contingent facts not determined by God’s will, in particular no CCFs fitting this description. There may be conditionals of creaturely freedom (though not of libertarian freedom), but either they are not contingent or they are made true by God. Second, he does not agree that libertarian free will is necessary for human responsibility. And third, he will not grant that the scope of what God can bring about is any narrower than the scope of what is possible—his providence is not hemmed in by the free choices of unruly creatures. It follows that Plantinga’s solution to the problem of evil is not available to the theological determinist, though a close cousin is available, sort of, as I will argue later.

There is a fourth alternative to TD that probably deserves more attention than it has yet received. The three major alternatives discussed so far deny the first clause of the definition of TD, that the facts about God’s will entail every other contingent fact. However, someone dissatisfied with TD might instead deny its second clause, that the facts about God’s will are ex-planatorily prior to every other contingent fact. That is, one could hold either that our choices somehow determine God’s will or that there is some kind of pre-established harmony between God’s will and our choices, with no explanatory priority either way.¹⁸ Either tactic would mean that the facts about God’s will were not explanatorily prior to facts about human choices, opening the way for a libertarianism of either the leeway or the source variety.

As far as I can tell, such a view would not do very much to defend strong notions of God’s providence or sovereignty, that is, it is a Risk-Taking view, and I can think of some other problems, too. Frankly, though, no one has worked out the position well enough for me to grapple with it extensively, and I won’t dwell on it further in this book. For the record, however, it seems to me a promising avenue for future research.¹⁹

In discussing these alternatives to TD, I have ignored sources of contingency other than free human action (or conditionals pertaining to free human action), but any number of such sources could be incorporated into any of the views. Candidates could include nonhuman free wills or genuinely random occurrences such as quantum events or nuclear decay.

What drives all these alternative views, however (and the reason that other ultimate sources of contingency are not much discussed) is the conviction that human libertarian free will is vital to preserve in the Christian context. In contrast, before the book concludes I will have argued that the appeal of libertarian free will is largely illusory. Before we get to that stage, however, I want to elaborate on my preferred version of TD and present some positive reasons to prefer it to its rivals.

ONE

Divine Action

In the introduction I gave a formal definition of TD and noted some of what did and did not follow. In this chapter I want to elaborate on this position in several ways. TD comes in a number of possible versions, and I want to identify one that I think is most promising. To explain it, I want to exercise the imagination a little bit, as I think that will aid understanding as much as any formal definition. Also, I want to round out the picture with a discussion of how to think about God’s action in the world.

THE PICTURE

One way of thinking about God’s relationship to his creation goes like this. God created seven billion or so other agents, all with libertarian free will, and turned them loose. These seven billion agents tend to get in each other’s way. We are all quite familiar with our projects’ being frustrated by our recalcitrant fellow human beings. God is in much the same situation, except that he is vastly more powerful, intelligent, and long-lived than the seven billion others that he must outwit, outplay, and outlast. This is more or less the vision of creation entertained by open theism.

According to the theological determinist, this view is completely wrong-headed. According to TD, God is the complete and utter master of what goes on in creation because he simply decides on it all and then executes his decisions. God is not one agent acting in the universe, interacting with various other agents, differing only in his degree of power, knowledge, and goodness. No — God is the ultimate agent, the one who makes it all happen, along with the other agents and their exercises of agency. What they do, they do because of God’s will, and there is no looseness in the causal relations between his will and theirs. His position vis-à-vis other agents is not that of a grandmaster playing a ninety-dimensional chess match against seven billion opponents, not even if we add that he some-how has advance knowledge of what moves they will or would make.

Another way of thinking about God’s relationship to his creation is like the former except that, instead of granting agents libertarian free will, God has created a deterministic world and turned it loose. In the Newtonian image, the universe is a giant piece of clockwork. People act, but their actions are completely determined by the initial conditions created by God and the ironclad natural laws governing the universe. This is more or less the vision of the eighteenth-century deists, and it is a form of TD. However, it is not the form of