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Human freedom and divine providence: some new thoughts on an old problem

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

David Basinger
David Basinger
Affiliation:
Professor of Philosophy, John Wesley College, Owosso, Michigan
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Extract

Christian theists have not normally wished to deny either of the following tenets:

T1 God creates human agents such that they are free with respect to certain actions and, therefore, morally responsible for them.

T2 God is an omniscient, wholly good being who is omnipotent in the sense that he has (sovereign, providential) control over all existent states of affairs.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 15 , Issue 4 , December 1979 , pp. 491 - 510
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

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References

page 492 note 1 Moral evil is that evil brought about by the voluntary actions of human agents. The compatibilistic God is of course also responsible for all physical evil, but this paper is only concerned with moral evil and its relationship to T1 and T2.

page 492 note 2 Stated differently, to say that an evil state of affairs is non-gratuitous is to say that, if such an evil were eliminated, the world would ultimately contain a smaller net balance of good over evil.

page 493 note 1 If T3 and T4 were denied, central Biblical themes such as sin, alienation, confession, forgiveness and salvation would no longer make any sense.

page 493 note 2 Some compatibilists will argue, however, that since ‘God's logic’ need not conform to man's intellectual capacity, it is justifiable to assume the dilemma is only prima facie, even though we as humans will never understand why.

page 494 note 1 I have labelled this problem ‘theological’ because it relates to a seeming inconsistency between the Leibnizian concept of freedom and other accepted orthodox tenets.

page 495 note 1 I have labelled this problem ‘philosophical’ because it is related strictly to the meaning of the terms involved, not to intra-theistic consistency.

page 496 note 1 For a fuller discussion of this issue, see Plantinga, Alvin, God, Freedom and Evil (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), pp. 29–53Google Scholar; Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 164–93.Google Scholar

page 497 note 1 Geach, Peter, Providence and Evil (Cambridge: University Press, 1977), p. 58.Google Scholar

page 498 note 1 Such instances of evil would still remain gratuitous in that (I) God did not desire that they occur originally and (2) it might be that the good states of affairs God brings about could have been generated without the occurrence of the evil states of affairs in question.

page 499 note 1 RP1-RP3 must be seen as distinct divine actions because it is possible to distinguish a person's choosing to do an action (X) from his actually doing X or from X having certain predictable consequences.

page 500 note 1 See, for example, Reichenbach, Bruce, ‘Natural Evils and Natural Law: a Theodicy’, International Philosophical Quarterly (June 1976).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 506 note 1 It cannot be argued here that each person will at least be justly recompensed in an afterlife. Given orthodox theology, ‘unbelievers’, it seems, will not be directly recompensed for the undeserved gratuitous evil experienced in their earthly existence.

page 506 note 2 The motivation for this distinction is quite obvious. If God's actions were counted as moral goods, then God could easily have created states of affairs in which there would have been only moral goods - e.g. states of affairs in which God is the only free being.

page 507 note 1 We are here talking about a logical, not a temporal, sequencing of events since, by definition, God has always known what he knows.