Why christians should not be libertarians: An Augustinian challenge

Faith and Philosophy

Volumn 20, Issue 4, 2003, Pages 460-478

  Baker, Lynne Rudder ^a  

^a Faith and Philosophy ^*  (United States)

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EID: 33645763820     PISSN: 07397046     EISSN: 21533393     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/faithphil20032045     Document Type: Article

References (55)

1. Linda Zagzebski, The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991): p. 3.
2. Alvin Plantinga, God and Other Minds, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press): p. 134.
3. Also see Peter van Inwagen, "Free Will Remains a Mystery" in The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, Robert Kane, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002): 158-177;
4. Peter van Inwagen, "When Is the Will Free?" Philosophical Perspectives 3, Philosophy of Mind and Action Theory, 1989, James E. Tomberlin, ed. (Atascadero, CA: Ridgewiew Publishing Co., 1989): 399-422.
5. Reprinted in Agents, Causes and Events: Essays on Indeterminism and Free Will, Timothy O'Connor, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995): 219-238;
6. William Hasker, The Emergent Self (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999);
7. Eleonore Stump, "Augustine on Free Will" in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001): 124-147;
8. Timothy O'Connor, "Agent Causation" in Agents, Causes, and Events: Essays on Indeterminism and Free Will, ed. Timothy O'Connor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995): 170-200;
9. Thomas P. Flint, Divine Providence: The Molinist Account (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).
10. John Martin Fischer (1994) has argued that God's existence raises exactly the same problems with respect to moral responsibility as causal determinism. John Martin Fischer, The Metaphysics of Free Will (Cambridge MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1994).
11. Linda Zagzebski, "Recent Work on Divine Foreknowledge and Free Will" in The Oxford Handbook on Free Will, Robert Kane, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002): p. 48.
12. Augustine, On Nature and Grace, in Saint Augustine: Four Anti-Pelagian Writings: On Nature and Grace, On the Proceedings of Pelagius, On the Predestination of the Saints, On the Gift of Perseverance, John A. Mourant and William J. Collinge, trans. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1992): pp. 3-90.
13. Martin Luther, On the Bondage of the Will in Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation, trans, and ed. by E. Gordon Rupp (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1969): p. 328.
14. Thomas P. Flint, "Two Accounts of Providence" in Divine and Human Action, Thomas V. Morris, ed. (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1988): p. 165. The "Thomist God is an active sovereign who knowingly causes (directly or indirectly) all that occurs." (p. 164)
15. Augustine, On Nature and Grace, op. cit., 23.(25).
16. Ibid. 48.56. Pelagius used 'nature' and 'grace' as near synonyms. Since God is the Author of nature, grace comes from God. Augustine complains of the examples that Pelagius gives of grace: a man can dispute by means of his tongue, a bird can fly by means of its wings; a rabbit can run by means of its feet. Augustine comments that these things (tongue, wings, feet) are effective by nature; Pelagius has not "proposed anything that we would want to understand to be grace." Augustine, On Nature and Grace, 11. (12).
17. Augustine, On Nature and Grace, 23. (25).
18. For a summary of interpretations of Original Sin, see "Original Sin," in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, F.L. Cross and E.A. Livingstone, eds.(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997): pp. 1195-1197.
19. For an interesting discussion of the biblical basis for the doctrine, see Philip L. Quinn, "Disputing the Augustinian Legacy: John Locke and Jonathan Edwards on Romans 5:12-19," in The Augustinian Tradition, edited by Gareth B. Matthews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999): 233-250.
20. Augustine is quoting Pelagius, On Nature and Grace, 30. (34).
21. Gareth B. Matthews, Thought's Ego in Augustine and Descartes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).
22. According to Thomas Flint (Divine Providence, op. cit., pp. 29-31), one reason to believe in libertarian freedom is that God has it, and we should have the same freedom as God. According to Augustine, after the Fall, we do not have libertarian free will. Moreover, insofar as libertarian free will entails the ability to will both good and evil, it is doubtful that God has it. Being essentially good, He cannot will evil. For Augustine, true freedom is the inability to will evil (which perhaps human beings will have in eternal life), not libertarian freedom.
23. James Wetzel, "Predestination, Pelagianism, and Foreknowledge," in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001): p. 54.
24. Augustine, On the Predestination of the Saints, op. cit., 19. (38))
25. John M. Rist, "Augustine on Free Will and Predestination," in Augustine: A Collection of Critical Essays, R.A. Markus, ed. (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books/Doubleday & Co., 1972): p. 238. Emphasis his.
26. This point is explicitly affirmed by the Lutheran-Catholic Concordat, which is compatibilist throughout: "When Catholics say that persons 'co-operate' in preparing for and accepting justification by consenting to God's justifying action, they see such personal consent as itself an effect of grace, not as an action arising from innate human abilities." Joint Declaration on Doctrine of Justification by the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church (1998). 4.1.20.
27. Augustine, On the Predestination of the Saints, op. cit., 8.(13).
28. I find Augustine's views in On the Free Choice of the Will confusing.
29. Augustine, The Essential Augustine, ed. Vernon J. Bourke (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co.). 1981, p. 177. Emphasis mine.
30. Quoted in Dennis Creswell, Augustine's Dilemma: Grace and Eternal Law in the Major Works of Augustine of Hippo (New York: Peter Lang Publishing Company). 1997, p. 101. From City of God, BookV:9. Bettenson, 191-2.
31. Thomas Aquinas, Aquinas, Summa Theologica, in Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 2, Anton C. Pegis, ed. (New York: Random House, 1944).
32. First Part of the Second Part, question 9, article 6, Reply Obj 3: "God moves man's will, as the Universal Mover, to the universal object of the will, which is the good." Also: "[T]he cause of the will can be none other than God." In addition, see Thomas P. Flint, Divine Providence, op. cit., p. 87.
33. Although Flint himself defends Molina's view, Aquinas can be interpreted along compatibilist lines. See Thomas J. Loughran, "Aquinas, Compatibilist" in Divine and Human Agency: Anglican, Catholic, and Lutheran Perspectives, F. Michael McLain and W. Mark Richardson, eds. (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1999): 1-40;
34. and Robert Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature: A Philosophical Study of Summa Theologiae la 75-89 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
35. See Harry Frankfurt, "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person." Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971): 5-20. Conditions (i)-(iii) below are borrowed from Frankfurt. I added condition (iv).
36. The role of the first-person perspective in compatibilist conditions of free will has been overlooked. Conditions (ii) - (iv) require a first-person perspective. I shall give a fuller compatibilist account of moral responsibility in "On Being One's Own Person" in Reasons of One's Own, Maureen Sie, Bert van den Brink, Marc Slors, eds. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, forthcoming).
37. and Randolph Clarke, "Toward a Credible Agent-Causal Account of Free Will" in Agents, Causes, and Events: Essays on Indeterminism and Free Will, ed. Timothy O'Connor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995): 201-215.
38. For a defense of the event-causal version of libertarianism see Robert Kane, The Significance of Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
39. Roderick Chisholm, "Freedom and Action," in Freedom and Determinism, Keith Lehrer, ed. (New York: Random House, 1966): p. 23. Emphasis mine. Timothy O'Connor, another agent-causalist, mentions that some have used the term 'unmoved movers,' but he prefers 'not wholly moved movers.' (O'Connor, op. cit., p. 174). The latter is suggestive, but not sufficiently developed to know whether it would conflict with the doctrine of creation. O'Connor wants to allow causal relations between an agent's reason and resulting behavior. On O'Connor's view, agents have a property that can "make possible the direct, purposive bringing about of an effect by the agent who bears it." (p. 177) Emphasis his.
40. Eleonore Stump, "Augustine on Free Will," op. cit., p. 126.
41. I remain doubtful. Libertarians point out that if we have libertarian free will, God cannot cause us always to do good. (See Alvin Plantinga, "God, Evil and the Metaphysics of Freedom," in The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974): 164-195.
42. Reprinted in The Problem of Evil, Marilyn McCord Adams and Robert Merrihew Adams, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992): 83-109.) But the logical point is that if our free will were libertarian, God could never be a cause of our freely doing good.
43. See Chapters 1-3 in Derk Pereboom, Living Without Free Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) for a new and thoroughgoing refutation of the view that we have libertarian free will. (On the other hand, I did not find persuasive his arguments against compatibilism.)
44. Plantinga extends his free-will defense to natural evils like earthquakes by showing that it is logically possible that natural evils are caused by free non-human beings (devils). This is enough to show the logical consistency of the proposition mat God is omnipotent, omniscient and wholly good with the existence of natural evil. But, as Plantinga ("God, Evil and the Metaphysics of Freedom," op. cit., pp. 192-3) says, this is only a logical point, not an explanation of natural evil.
45. Many people agree with Albert Schweitzer who, in Out of My Life and Thought: An Autobiography, said: "Even while I was a boy at school it was clear to me that no explanation of the evil in the world could ever satisfy me; all explanations, I felt, ended in sophistries, and at bottom had no other object than to minimize our sensitivity to the world around us,"
46. Quoted by Stanley N. Katz, "Choosing Justice over Excellence," The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 17, 2002: B9.
47. Matthews, Thought's Ego, op cit., p. 99
48. Christopher Kirwan, Augustine (London: Routledge, 1989): p. 128. Sometimes Augustine interpreted the text to mean that representatives from all groups of men are saved.
49. Augustine, Enchiridion 103.27. Quoted by Kirwan, op. cit., p. 128.
50. See, e.g., Marilyn McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).
51. Other recent proponents of (at least the possibility of) universalism include Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol. II, part 2, Ch. 7, section 35, #3
52. "The Determination of the Elect" (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1957): 421-423;
53. Karl Barth, "The Humanity of God" (1956), in The Humanity of God, (Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1974): 37-65;
54. John Hick, Death and Eternal Life (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994).
55. As I mentioned, Pereboom argues that compatibilist free will is untenable as well. I intend to respond to Pereboom in "Moral Responsibility Without Libertarianism" (in preparation).