Philosophers have spent a lot of time asking ‘Does God exist, and what is God's nature?’. They have also engaged at length with the question ‘Do people have free will?’. Often, though, their discussions of these questions have been presented without bringing them together. So we frequently find philosophers talking about the existence and nature of God while saying nothing about human freedom. And we find many authors writing about human freedom while having nothing to offer on the existence and nature of God.
Yet these topics can be treated as overlapping. The belief that our behaviour is totally determined by prior physical causes has led some philosophers to favour atheism, while certain beliefs about God's goodness have influenced other thinkers in the direction of the view that we sometimes enjoy a robust kind of freedom from causal determinism. Again, some philosophers have argued that even though our actions always have causes distinct from us, it does not follow that we are therefore unfree — a view which has led some to the conclusion that freedom is somehow compatible with causal necessitation, even by God.
As Timpe and Speak explain: ‘The primary goal of this collection is to address the interplay between philosophical debates about free will, on the one hand, and about theistic religious belief, on the other’ (p. 3). And it does so successfully. Free Will and Theism provides discussions of freedom that seriously engage with discussions concerning God, and vice versa. And the essays in the volume are all as philosophically sophisticated as any that one might expect to find in a book published by Oxford University Press .
The view that free actions are uncaused is usually referred to as ‘libertarianism’, and some philosophers have suggested that libertarianism has often been promoted in philosophical circles more by theological reasons than by hard‐headed philosophical ones. This is a view that Manuel R. Vargas lucidly defends in the book's first essay, one which Timpe and Speak seem to take seriously since they highlight it in their introduction while noting the extent to which theists trying to defend belief in God in the light of the so‐called ‘problem of evil’ have recourse to what is called ‘the free will defence’. And Vargas's line of thinking is echoed and defended by John Martin Fischer in the book's second essay, which, with an eye on belief in God, argues that we have grounds for adopting a ‘compatibilist’ view of freedom — one which takes freedom to be the product of causes beyond our control, one which holds that freedom can co‐exist with determinism. Fittingly, perhaps, Fischer's essay is followed by one by Laura W. Ekstrom, who claims that libertarian free will is not as valuable as many theists take it to be when they write about the problem of evil.
Subsequent essays in the volume address the following questions: (1) What implications for free will and the goodness of God follow from the belief that God is ultimately responsible for all that we do? (2) Can we establish universally true conditions for moral responsibility so as to show the superiority of one view of human freedom over another? (3) What future can we take ourselves to have before God if we effectively lack moral responsibility? (4) Should theists think kindly of the view that freedom is compatible with causal determinism? (5) Does belief in God favour any particular approach to what human freedom amounts to? (6) Could God have brought about the existence of a world in which there are free agents but no moral evil? (7) Does belief in God's universal causality conflict with the view that indeterminism is required in the process that produces a free act? (8) In what sense can God be thought of as free?
Clearly, therefore, Free Will and Theism contains much to think about. That said, however, I get the impression that its contributors are, for the most part, fixated on an either‐or distinction that would not have made sense to some notable philosopher theologians of the past. Here I am thinking of Thomas Aquinas, who is cited by name nine times in the Index, though his views on God and freedom are never expounded and reflected on by any contributor to the present volume — though W. Matthews Grant, in ‘Divine Causality and Libertarian Freedom’, seems well to realize how Aquinas's thinking might be of use when it comes to contemporary debates about God and freedom.
I mention Aquinas now since, without supposing that our free actions could be free if they are causally determined, he thinks that all of our actions have to be caused by God acting in us as our Creator. Aquinas is clear that if we are causally determined by things in the universe, then we are, say, no more free to converse with each other as are two alarm clocks going off at the same time. He thinks that we are free if nothing in the world is compelling us to act as we do. But he also argues that divine causation of our actions is not a matter of God forcing us to do anything. On his account (a traditional one if you take account of the history of theology since New Testament times), God is not something behind the scenes either forcing anything or permitting it to go this way or that. Aquinas asks us to note that things are as they are just because God is making them to exist as whatever they are.
Aquinas presents this view in a number of his writings, but he does so in an especially clear way in his commentary on Aristotle's Peri Hermeneias 1.14. Here he writes: ‘God's will is to be thought of as existing outside the realm of existents, as a cause from which pours forth everything that exists in all its variant forms. Now what can be and what must be are variants of being, so that it is from God's will itself that things derive whether they must be or may or may not be, and the distinction of the two according to the nature of the two according to their immediate causes. For he prepares causes that must cause for those effects that he wills must be, and causes that might cause but might fail to cause for those effects that he wills might or might not be. And it is because of the nature of their causes that some effects are said to be effects that must be and others effects that need not be, although all depend on God's will as primary cause, a cause that transcends the distinction between must and might not.’ (I quote from Timothy McDermott's translation in Thomas Aquinas: Selected Philosophical Writings, Oxford University Press, 1993, p. 283).
You may agree with Aquinas here, or you might conclude that he is talking nonsense. But I think that the present volume would have been much improved by some essays dwelling, whether favourably or otherwise, on the line of argument that he presents in texts such as the one I have just noted, and on his underlying suggestion that God should never be thought of as something existing alongside us, as our fellow creatures are, and as able to tinker with us or to leave us on our own as things independent of his causality. Contributors to Free Will and Theism mostly tend to assume that we can act independently of God or as determined by God. Aquinas, I would note, has a different view of God and human freedom to recommend.
