Apparently, a determinist can believe anything he wants, but he cannot live any way he wants: “A determinist cannot live consistently as though everything he thinks and does is causally determined—especially his choice to believe that determinism is true! Thinking that you’re determined to believe that everything you believe is determined produces a kind of vertigo. Nobody can live as though all that he thinks and does is determined by causes outside himself. Even determinists recognize that we have to act “as if” we had free will and so weigh our options and decide on what course of action to take, even though at the end of the day we…
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Reply To Alexander Pruss
Alexander Pruss argues for the following: “given soft determinism, it is in principle possible to avoid culpability while still getting the exact same results whenever you don’t know prior to deliberation how you will choose. This seems absurd, and the absurdity gives us a reason to reject the compatibility of determinism and responsibility.” Pruss asks us to suppose, for reductio, that determinism is true and that we are morally responsible for our actions. Then he tells the following tale: …imagine a device that can be activated at a time when an agent is about to make a decision. The device reads the agent’s mind, figures out which action the agent…
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Free Will: More Than One Game in Town
I have spent many an hour in the company of friends who hold to a form of libertarian free will. Most conversations on the matter are gracious and good spirited. Some people are slightly mystified by my Calvinism, but they earnestly seek to know what it is and why anyone would hold to such a thing. Occasionally, however, I have confronted the more extreme type who claims that there can be only one kind of free will. They represent a necessary-truth type of libertarian free will proponent. Evan Minton is of this stripe. He argues that libertarian free will is the only game in town. We either have the libertarian…
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What’s Love Got To Do With Free Will?
The most common objection to Divine Determinism is that if God determines everything, then human beings are not morally responsible for their actions. In other words, for a human agent to be morally responsible for their actions, they can’t have been determined to carry those actions out. The defender of libertarian free will will often say: “No LFW, no moral responsibility.” This is perhaps the strongest argument against determinism (although there are good responses). However, some argue that there is an additional feature of human life that would not be possible if there is no LFW – love. Love, it is suggested, is only possible if a human being has…
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Would Determinism Make Love Unreal?
Compatbilists about free will hold that, although everything is determined by God, human beings are free because they are able to operate, uncoerced, according to their desires. Greg Boyd argues that such a view inhibits the possibility of loving relationships particularly when it comes to human relationships with God. He describes the following scenario in order to make his point: Suppose I were able to invent a computer chip that could interact with a human brain in a deterministic fashion, causing the person who carries the chip to do exactly what the chip dictates without the person knowing this. Suppose further that I programmed this chip to produce the perfect…
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The Foreknowledge Argument
The foreknowledge argument is supposed to establish the truth of determinism. I think it works in the favor of determinism (of the divine kind not the naturalistic, causal kind). Whether or not one is convinced by the conclusion of the argument is dependent, at least in part, on whether or not one can come up a valid form of the argument. In this post I intend to provide one (but not invent or originate one; only to repeat one from my elders and betters). First, let’s distinguish determinism from fatalism. Fatalism is the view that whatever happens must happen. There is no way things could have been anything other than…
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Some Responses to Greg Boyd’s Argument from Conceptual Content
Here’s a really interesting argument for libertarian free will. I found it in Greg Boyd’s Satan and the Problem of Evil: If humans lack a logically consistent concept of self determining freedom, What provides the analogical ground by which we can talk about God is gracious self determining freedom? A concept devoid of all experiential content is vacuous. If we assume that it is meaningful to claim that nothing outside gods will caused him to create and interact with the world, That he could have done otherwise, And that his decisions are not capricious, Then we must affirm that we experience something like this sort of freedom. In short, Unless…
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So, You’re a Calvinist. But What About Free Will?
Just what, if one is a Calvinist, can be meant by human free will? And how, given that everything that happens is decided in advance, makes a human beings responsible for their actions? These are the most common questions aimed at those who are committed to a strong doctrine of sovereignty, one that features the idea that God determines all that happens in advance. Determinism is the idea that for everything that happens there are antecedent conditions such that, given those conditions, nothing else could occur. For a Calvinist, the antecedent condition in question is ultimately God’s will. God’s will is such that every event in creation is determined by God in advance of the event. We call…