Okay, let me try this. I'm going to try to do explain my position quickly (I know this is a bad idea and that I'm going to regret this). I'll start with a cut and paste with some edits to what I wrote in my thesis and expand on that.
So, let me start with recognizing that divine determinism is a real problem, It is real enough that some advocates of DS think that it cannot be overcome and instead just say that we have to be compatibilists of some sort . . . namely, insist that it is somehow okay that God makes our choices for us. So clearly, the free will issue is a real one, much as it is for pretty much every theological position! In my case, it presents a twofold problem for DS, for although freedom seems to require the reality of contingencies, simplicity appears to deny contingency in 1) God’s acts, 2) man’s acts. Since simplicity requires that God have no accidental properties and be the same across all possible worlds, it looks as if God necessarily exists the way He does, including His knowledge of what He (and others) will do. But in that case, then neither God nor man is free.
In answering the first problem, Aquinas says things can be necessary either absolutely or by supposition. Things absolutely necessary are those that cannot fail to be the way they are. For instance, all unmarried men are bachelors. Things are necessary by supposition when they are the way they are in reality, but they could have been otherwise. So if Socrates is sitting on a stone, it is necessary true he is so sitting, but only by supposition, for he could have been some other way.
Now, according to Aquinas, God wills His own goodness absolutely necessarily, but on that count, so do humans. Yet just as what humans will is necessary only by supposition, so it is for God. Thus it is necessary that God wills, but what God wills is not necessary in the strong sense. So it is easy to conclude with Thomas that “Wherefore we must simply say that God can do other things than those He has done.” There is no violation of simplicity for the reason that what God does is necessary only by supposition. This solves the broad problem of contingency that some contingent facts (e.g., “Humans exist”) are known by God, for those contingent facts are true only because God Himself freely willed them. They are, again, now necessarily true, but only by supposition. Thus, general contingency as well as God’s knowledge of contingent things does not conflict with simplicity.
The contingency found in human free will is much more difficult. As noted just above, some people think it cannot be overcome and that simplicity entails some form of compatibilism, which is to say, the divine determinism that I agree with you is very objectionable.
The problem may be put very succinctly:
one must decide if human actions can be absolutely independent of God (that is, if humans can be true self-movers apart from God). If so, then libertarian free will is easily upheld. But this view creates at least serious problems: 1) it makes God’s knowledge contingent on human actions (making God Himself in some sense dependent on humans), and 2) it means humans are in some sense independent of God.
If one decides that absolute independence is impossible, then one must either affirm that the will is determined by God or not. If so, God’s aseity and sovereignty are easily maintained at the expense of free will, and one is left with some type of compatibilism. If not, then one must explain how a choice that is ultimately dependent on God is not thereby determined by Him.
Aquinas tries to argue that human action is not independent of God but that our will is also not determined by His choice. His explanation of how a choice is is ultimatenly dependent on Him but not thereby determined by Him is as follows:
- God, therefore, is the first cause, Who moves causes both natural and voluntary. And just as by moving natural causes He does not prevent their acts being natural, so by moving voluntary causes He does not deprive their actions of being voluntary . . . for He operates in each thing according to its own nature.
Here, his general defense is that just as God is the First Cause of all natural causes, and yet that does not deprive them of being natural causes, so also God can be the First Cause of all voluntary (free) causes without determining them. He makes a similar claim elsewhere:
- [God] moves all things in accordance with their conditions; so that from necessary causes through the Divine motion, effects follow of necessity; but from contingent causes, effects follow contingently. Since, therefore, the will is an active principle, not determinate to one thing, but having an indifferent relation to many things, God so moves it, that He does not determine it of necessity to one thing, but its movement remains contingent and not necessary, except in those things to which it is moved naturally.
Again, Thomas thinks that God moves causes according to their nature. Since the will is inclined to what is good, but since there can be many good things (or things perceived as good), the will is not determined to choose any one. As such, God moves it according to its proper contingency.But it is not clear how the will can freely choose among its contingencies without violating God’s aseity, sovereignty, and simplicity.
One possible answer lies in the nature of being itself. Aquinas insists that all perfections pre-exist in God, since God is the First Cause.Since intelligence is a perfection, God is obviously intelligent. But more to the point, since God is pure being, this means that whatever being itself is, when manifested in a certain way, men call it intelligence.In other words, being has latent within itself the ability to be self-determined. Thus, to the degree that man wills, he is exercising the very nature of being, in fact the highest nature of being in created things.
If this is true, and on a Thomistic metaphysic it appears to be, then
the answer to how humans can make a choice dependent on God without that choice being absolutely necessarily determined by Him turns out to be the same as how God Himself can make a choice dependent on Himself without His own choice being absolutely necessary. Man, by virtue of being an intelligent creature, can will this rather than that. God, as the First Cause, actualizes it through the man and thus knows that contingency as a contingency as He would any other.
One may try to object by pointing out that this answer appears to make God respond to a person’s choice, thereby violating again God’s aseity. But this fails to recognize that it is the very nature of being to self-determine, whether in God or in man. As such, God, as the First Cause, is simply working out all effects in accordance with their formal nature, just as Thomas suggested.
I want to emphasize what I italicized just above. The distinction between necessity absolutely and by necessity is important. The former is determined. The latter is not. This distinction is why Molinism (in its classical sense) ultimately fails the free will test. Molina himself thought that the reason God knows the future is because He knows us so well that He knows what we will ALWAYS choose in any given circumstance. In other words, Molina understood that we will choose A or B necessarily because of our nature. The only reason we can't predict the future is not because our wills are indeterminate, but because we can't know all the variables at once. But God can, and so He can predict with mathematical certainty what we will always do. So on classical Molinism, the will is determined, and we do what we do absolutely necessarily, just as a triangle having three sides is absolutely necessary. Later Molinists realized the problem and corrected for it, making man's will really indeterminate. But then God cannot know our future based on a knowledge of our nature. Instead, He knows the future because He sees all our possible actions and then chooses to actualize this rather than that world. In other words, God sees in world A I am writing this post and in world B I am not writing this post. And God, apparently wanting me to write this post, actualizes world A. There are two serious problems with this view. The first is that it denies God's aseity, because it makes man's decisions logically prior to God's, insofar as God "looks to see" what I will do and then actualizes a particular world
in response to my choices. But that makes God contingent on me. The second problem is that it denies God Himself freedom. And this is the REAL problem, for we see it denies God real sovereignty (and now we are getting back to my point). For here, God has some criteria by which He thinks that World A is "better" than World B. But this means that there is some criterion by which God judges what is "better" than something else. On this point, I think Frederick Copleston's remarks are helpful:
- God did not will this present order of things necessarily, and the reason is that the end of creation is the divine goodness which so exceeds any created order that there is not and cannot be any link of necessity between a given order and the end of creation. The divine goodness and the created order are incommensurable, and there cannot be any one created order, any one universe, which is necessary to a divine goodness that is infinite and incapable of any addition. If any created order were proportionate to the divine goodness, to the end, then the divine wisdom would be determined to choose that particular order; but since the divine goodness is infinite and creation necessary finite, no created order can be proportionate in the full sense to the divine goodness.
From the above is made apparent the answer to the question whether God could make better things than He has made or could make the things which He has made better than they are. In one sense God must always act in the best possible manner, since God's act is identical with His essence and with infinite goodness; but we cannot conclude from this that the extrinsic object of God's act, creatures, must be the best possible and taht God is bound, on account of His goodness, to produce the best possible universe if He produces one at all. As God's power is infinite, there can always be a better universe than the one God actually produces, and why He has chosen to produce a particular order of creation is His secret. St. Thomas says, therefore, that absolutely speaking God could make something better than any given thing. But if the question is raise din regard to the existent universe, a distinction must be drawn. God could not make a given thing better than it actually is in regard to its substance or essence, since that would be to make another thing. For example, rational life is in itself a higher perfection than merely sensitive life; but if God were to make a horse rational it would no longer be a horse and in that case God could not be said to make the horse better. Similarly, if God changed the order of the universe, it would not be the same universe. On the other hand, God could make a thing accidentally better; He could, for example, increase a man's bodily health, or, in the supernatural order, his grace.
It is plain, then, that St. Thomas would not agree with the Leibnizian 'optimism' or maintain that this is the best of all possible worlds. In view of the divine omnipotence the phrase 'the best of all possible worlds' does not seem to have much meaning: it has meaning only if one supposes from the start that God creates from a necessity of His nature, from which it would follow, since God is goodness itself, that the world which proceeds from Him necessarily must be the best possible. But if God creates not from necessity of nature, but according to His nature, according to intelligence and will, that is, freely, and if God is omnipotent, it must always be possible for God to create a better world. Why, then, did He create this particular world? That is a question to which we cannot give any adequate answer, though we can certainly attempt to answer the question why God created a world in which suffering and evil are present": that is to say, we can attempt to answer the problem of evil, provided that we remember to that we cannot expect to attain any comprehensive solution of the problem in this life, owing to the finitude and imperfection of our intelligences and the fact that we cannot fathom the divine counsel and plans.
(From A History of Philosophy: Volume 2, Part 2 -- Albert the Great to Duns Scotus (Garden City, NY: Image Books,1962), 89-90. Imprimatur: Joseph, Archiepiscopus Birmingamiensis Die 24 Aprilis 1948)
In short, we cannot presume that God created this world rather than another out of some general necessity. God cannot create out of any degree of necessity. The moment you say that, you deny God's absolute freedom, and so long as you insist on denying God's freedom you are denying His aseity and self-sufficiency. And since Molinism does that very thing, the irony is that Molinism is just reinventing Euthyphro insofar as it is making God dependent on some standard of goodness beyond Himself.
That is not to say that God created for no reason. It is to say that God created for no necessary reason. He could have had that reason rather than this one and thereby created that world rather than this one. That world could have been "better" or "worse" from your or my perspective, but it would have been neither better nor worse than this one to God. All that matters is that His reason is His own, and it is enough for us to say as much and bow before Him and grant Him our "Amen." We really need to step back and realize that by insisting on a reason that God must act in this way rather than that we are placing Him under obligation, under a standard, and thereby denying that He is, in the end, God.
As Copleston says, His reasons are secret, known only to Him so far as we know. And were He to tell us, and we said, "But why that reason, God? Why not another?" then that reason would be His own, known only to Him as far as we could know. And so on it would be ad infinitum. Eventually, the answer must simply be, "Because God has so willed or no reason whatsoever other than the brute fact that He did, and that absolutely freely, under no compulsion or dependency of any kind whatsoever." Bottom line: there is no such thing as a "better" or "best" world as far as God is concerned. And that means that it is silly to think of Him actualizing "this" rather than "that" one.
And all of THAT plays very much back into the question of Hell and free will. God doesn't actualize our choice of going to heaven or hell. God doesn't determine our choice of going to heaven or hell. If we are going to affirm human freedom, we must affirm that the human will is indeterminate. It is determined to choose what it perceives to be a good (and, of course, it may be wrong in what it perceives to be good). But when it perceives multiple goods, there is nothing determining what it must choose. And that, by the way, is not entirely unprecedented. We see it in Quantum Mechanics. We know that a certain effect is determined to take place within a range of indeterminate possibilities. Now are we really to suggest that there is no real indeterminism there after all? That there is an underlying principle determining what MUST happen? I say no (although modern philosophy would expect there to be, at least modern popular philosophy). Or worse, are we to say that God Himself is choosing--determining--where every individual QM event happens? Again, that strikes me as silly.
What we need is a philosophy that allows for--that embraces--indeterminism, without denying God's sovereignty. And that is what Thomas provided above. God causes indeterminate events to happen in an indeterminate fashion, for that is their nature. That requires no change in God, because, for Thomas, all change is in the effect, not the cause (for a rough analogy, think about a potters hand as he is fashioning the clay. The clay responds to and is shaped by the hand, but the hand is not changed at all; yet it is the shape of the hand that determines the shape of the clay). So God, as Pure Act, brings into existence an
undetermined event.
Let me say that again:
God, as Pure Act, brings into existence undetermined events.
What it seems to me is happening in the free will debate is people are looking for a way for God to bring about determined events only. In the case of free will, they are making what we choose to be determined by ourselves, and in the case of Molinism, they make the determining factor God Himself by actualizing what it is that He likes that we choose! But if Thomas is right, and God can bring about undetermined events, then there is no reason that God cannot equally cause volitional (which are undetermined) events. That is because, as I explained above, Being just such the sort of thing that tends toward itself. That is what Being
does (which, by the way, is beautifully manifested in the Trinity). So when humans choose something and God brings about our choice, He is just causing being to exist in the highest form of defined being: namely, willed being (after all, the difference in an undetermined QM event and an undetermined volitional event is the will). And we see God does exactly the same thing in willing what He wills--not THAT He wills (which is necessary absolutely, and thus determined) but, again, WHAT He wills (which is undetermined, and only necessary by supposition).
And God has seen it fitting to will some people to Hell who freely will this or that (namely, the rejection of Christ). There is, then, no necessity of universal salvation. Of course, I cannot say that universal salvation is logically impossible. God COULD save everyone if He wanted. Remember, I think God is free to do whatever He wants. If you say that God CAN'T save everyone (going back to your divine rape argument), then you are denying God's freedom and sovereignty and are putting Him under some authority other than Himself. But I know it on faith that universal salvation is not true, insofar as God has
revealed that it is not true.
Now . . . I know that is a lot of text. I threw it together very quickly with some cut and paste jobs from other things I've written through the years and all that tied together with some of my own thoughts written just now. It still isn't sufficient to answer all your questions, K. I'm afraid it might raise more than it answers. But I hope you can see that I'm being honest with you. I'm not doing anything at your expense. I'm not equivocating. I'm not advocating Divine Determinism. I'm working from a position that has been widely rejected and bluntly ignored for about 400 years. There's a lot that goes with that. But I hope this is enough to at least get started!
