The hypothesis that God’s will is completely free, that He does not have to will what He wills, seems to present difficulties. Would it mean that His will does not have to be good or wise? That would make him an arbitrary tyrant. But the hypothesis that His will is not free, that it is compelled by necessity, that He cannot do otherwise than as He does, turns Him into a kind of Fate. Presumably even our prayers to such a God would be pointless, because for Him to respond to a prayer would be to will something different than what He would have willed had the prayer not been offered. St. Thomas distinguishes the question of whether there is anything that God wills by necessity from the question of whether He wills all that He wills by necessity. These questions turn out to have different answers.

Theological compatibilists have considered the will of God and creaturely wills to be aligned, such that divine election or determination does not undermine but rather preserves the free will of the creature. In the person of Jesus Christ this compatibility is held to be utterly flawless, and the human will of Christ to “follow after” or conform itself perfectly, and without sin, to the divine will. As a theological compatibilist I am persuaded by this largely Augustinian and Cyrillian Christology. However, critics may well wonder whether Christ’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane does not make such a view implausible, perhaps incoherent, and leads to an undermining of a proper doctrine of atonement. This essay undertakes to examine the narratives of Gethsemane in light of this criticism, and to offer a reply.

One of the distinctive features of Maimonides’ approach to the problem of evil is that he treats the problem not only from a metaphysical viewpoint, but from a psychological one as well. He blends philosophical, biblical, talmudic, and midrashic insight with psychological acumen, just as he does in his writings and communications to beleaguered communities and individuals. In the area of theodicy, then, he tackles two sorts of issue: (1) How God could allow any evil; how, in particular, God could allow the righteous to suffer and the wicked to prosper and (2) How human beings should experience and cope with suffering and death, and behave in its presence. For example, they need to ask themselves whether their personal situations affect how they assess the amount of evil in the world, whether what they regard as evils are truly evils or instead just contrary to their interests, whether they are blaming God for evils they caused out of their own free will, and what they can do to better their condition. Maimonides sometimes commutes between the psychological and philosophical dimensions of the problem.

In this conclusion of the book, I begin by offering some advice on evaluating the positions of others, especially concerning what we might think of as their willingness to reject clear and obvious intuitions we have in the defense of their positions. I especially call attention to doing so in a way that suggests that all those who reject our intuitions about divine determinism must be willing to do anything to preserve irrational religious beliefs. Intuitions, of course, are not universally shared, and the willingness to accept what others view as implausible is not limited to religious issues. I close by reviewing the challenges to divine determinism that I have explored in this work, noting what I view as the best responses to each and highlighting those that I find the most problematic.

Divine determinists face several problems related to divine commands, the divine will, and divine blame. First, if God sometimes wills that divine commands are broken (which seems to be the case if divine determinism is true) then the original act of command seems to be deceptive. Two other problems come from further considering the conflict between divine commands and the divine will. First, if there is such a conflict, then the deliberating agent who aims to obey divine commands and fulfill the divine will seems to face a problem, and if the divine will is followed above all, then the agent seems able to justify any course of action. Second, contrition ordinarily seems to include a desire that the previous bad action had not been performed, but given divine determinism, this seems to amount to a wish that the divine will had not been fulfilled. This seems impious. The final worry to be considered is that in determining agents to perform evil actions, God seems to have lost the standing to blame and punish them for these very actions. In this chapter I investigate each of these four objections, considering possible lines of response to each.