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The Freedom of God and Human Freedom
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
Extract
Our peculiar dignity as persons seems to rest on our freedom of action, since freedom of action is required to make sense both out of moral responsibility and out of the God—man relationship. Indeed, the possession of freedom seems to be a (if not the) major justification for claims that humans are in an important way images of God. Furthermore, the most promising theodicies all ascribe a good portion of the evil experienced in the world to the free actions of human beings.
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References
page 164 note 1 O'Connor, D.J., Free Will (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co. Inc., 1971), p. 82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
page 165 note 2 Features (2) and (3) are my ways of stating what O'Connor describes as necessary conditions for freedom of action. The specification that the second condition for free agency involves freedom from constraint imposed by other rational agents is based on my assumptions that to constrain someone is itself to perform an action and that in the absence of constraints an agent, by definition, has the ability to perform those actions which the constraints (if imposed) would serve to limit. The suggestion that someone's freedom of action might be constrained (in a broader sense of that term) by other than rational agents seems to amount to saying that the person does not really have the ability to perform the action(s) in question, i.e., that the first condition has not been met.
page 165 note 3 Campbell, C. A., ‘Is “Free-Will” a Pseudo-Problem?’ Mind LX (1951), pp. 441–465.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
page 166 note 4 Ryle, Gilbert, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson House, 1949).Google Scholar
page 167 note 5 This definition of determinism roughly corresponds to the one given by Berofsky, Bernard in Free Will and Determinism, ed. Berofsky, (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 6.Google Scholar
page 167 note 6 Penelhum, Terence, Religion and Rationality (New York: Random House, 1971), p. 245.Google Scholar
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page 168 note 8 O'Connor, , Free Will, p. 84.Google Scholar
page 168 note 9 Lukasiewicz, Jon, Selected Works, ed. Borowski, L. and trans. Wojesiewicz, O. (Amsterdam, North-Holland Publishing Co., 1970), p. 127.Google Scholar
page 169 note 10 O'Connor, , Free Will, p. 95.Google Scholar
page 169 note 11 ibid., p. 96.
page 171 note 12 Mackie, J. L., ‘Evil and Omnipotence’, Mind LXIV (1955), pp. 200–212CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pike, Nelson, ‘Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action’, Philosophical Review Vol. LXXIV (1965). pp. 27–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
page 171 note 13 Augustine, St., The City of God, trans. Walsh, Gerald G. S.J. (Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books, 1960), p. 105.Google Scholar
page 171 note 14 ibid.
page 171 note 15 ‘Evil and Omnipotence’, in God and Evil, ed. Pike, Nelson (Englewood Cliff, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1964), p. 56.Google Scholar
page 172 note 16 See ‘Evil and Omnipotence’ and also ‘Omnipotence’, Sophia Vol. I, No. 2 (1962).Google Scholar
page 173 note 17 This argument against Mackie is a condensed version of one that appeared in Steuer, A., ‘Once More On The Free Will Defence’, Religious Studies 10 (1974), pp. 301–311.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
page 173 note 18 See, for example, Hartshorne, Charles, Man's Vision of God and the Logic of Theism (New York: Harper & Row, 1941)Google Scholar, Chapter 3.1 do not here want to suggest either that I have adequately discussed Hartshorne's resolution to the problem of omnipotence or that my proposed solution is more useful to the systematic theologian. Rather, my intent is to point to one important difference betwen the ways he and I approach this problem.
page 174 note 19 Augustine, St., The City of God, p. 108.Google Scholar
page 174 note 20 St. Thomas Aquinas. Opuscula VII, Compendium Theologiae ad fratrem Reginaldum socium suum carissimum 12. This translation is found in Aquinas, St. Thomas, Philosophical Texts, trans, and ed. Gilby, Thomas (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 98.Google Scholar
page 174 note 21 See Pike, Nelson, ‘Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action’. Philosophical Review, Vol. LXXIV (1965), pp. 27–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar for a persuasive contemporary argument that the traditional Christian understanding of God's omniscience rules out the possibility that any human actions are free. Efforts to reconcile human freedom and divine omniscience which are similar to mine can be found in Penelhum's Religion and Rationality and in Hartshorne's Man's Vision of God. My argument differs from those of these other two authors by beginning with a different conception of freedom and, in the case of Hartshorne, by not seeing human freedom as a limitation of God's omniscience.
page 175 note 22 It might be noted that I am here employing an agent-causation view of actions that is favored by some contemporary philosophers, e.g., Roderick Chisholm, but not by others, e.g., William Alston. That actions are best understood as events caused by agents seems to roe to reflect (as I intend as much as possible in this essay) the common-sense view of actions.
page 175 note 23 My argument assumes that every person is unique in that among the things that distinguish persons from each other are their distinctive beliefs, past experiences, moral standards, intentions, and their reflections on all of these. Such distinguishing features of persons, furthermore, provide them with different reasons for acting. If someone actually shared another's so-called inner life to the extent that both individuals always had the same reasons for acting a certain way in a given situation and hence each could infallibly foreknow how the other would act, it seems to me that we could plausibly claim that we have here a single person rather than two distinct persons. This, however, gets us into some still very controversial issues associated with the questions of personal identity.
page 177 note 24 Again, the temptation might be strong (on the basis of Augustine's authority) to claim that a fourth option should be that God's foreknowledge, while certain, is of a sort that does not logically imply the absence of human freedom. While I will grant that this is still a sticky point, I can not see how something can be ‘known to be’ and yet still ‘not be in a certain way’. The defenders of a yet more Augustinian position than I have presented need to give a coherent account of the sort of foreknowledge they (and Jonathan Edwards?) ascribe to God. If God's knowledge and foreknowledge are so different in kind from human knowledge and prediction, why do they insist on referring to it as ‘knowledge’? A very helpful discussion of these problems is B. L. Hebblethwaite's ‘Some Reflections On Predestination, Providence and Divine Foreknowledge’, Religious Studies 15 (1979), pp. 433–48. Unlike Hebblethwaite, however, I do not want to argue that the creation of free agents requires a self-limitation on divine freedom.
page 178 note 25 In God and Timtlessness (New York: Schocken Books, Inc., 1970)Google Scholar, Nelson Pike explores in some detail the philosophical problems associated with Aquinas' notion that God exists beyond time. See also Nicholas Wolterstorff's interesting argument that biblical orthodoxy requires our viewing God as everlasting rather than as eternal (existing outside of time) in ‘God Everlasting’, reprinted in Steven Cahn, M. and Shatz, David, editors, Contemporary Philosophy of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 77–98.Google Scholar