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.
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 seri- ous 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. 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.
(Excerpted from introduction)
