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92 – creation and the sovereignty of god Free Will and Divine Sovereignty Five A satisfactory resolution of the problems canvassed in the last chapter can be had in only one way: by according God an active role as creator in the production of human action. To revert to the Openness view would be to give away too much—to accede, in effect, to the anti-theist’s objection that belief in the God of tradition cannot be sustained in the face of the world’s sin and suffering. And nothing short of a full involvement in the operations of creaturely wills seems consistent with the omniscience and sovereignty appropriate to a God who is as perfect as we can imagine him to be. But what shall we then say about libertarian freedom, which in the standard free-will defense places the primary responsibility for moral evil on us, and insulates God from our sinfulness? One option is simply to drop the idea of libertarianism , and opt for a completely different notion of human freedom. That was the reaction of Jonathan Edwards, who would never have accorded less than complete sovereignty to God, and whose version of free will is straightforward Lockean compatibilism.1 Compatibilist freedom is a conditional matter : I am free in acting just in case I would have done otherwise if some causal condition had been different—if, for example, I had chosen to behave differently, or if behaving differently had been my strongest desire. This kind of account permits both my action and the choice that led to it to have been determined, in which case they simply form part of the natural causal order. If that is all there is to free will, God can easily be complete master of the universe, as well as fully cognizant of all that occurs in it, for he can make the world a completely deterministic affair, in which all that will ever occur is fixed from the beginning in accordance with natural law. I would urge, however, that this move also surrenders too much. There are good reasons, worldly as well as theological, for defending at least some version of libertarian freedom. Furthermore, allying human freedom with free will and divine sovereignty – 93 God’s sovereignty as creator makes it possible to respond plausibly to a complaint often raised against libertarianism, that it is a violation of the principle of sufficient reason. And while I have argued that the traditional free-will defense against moral evil cannot succeed, we will see in the next chapter that human freedom is nevertheless an essential element in what I will claim is a plausible and satisfying theodicy of sin. There is, however, a question as to what constitutes libertarian freedom. Some may feel that if God’s role as creator is the same with respect to human willing as it is for the rest of what goes on in the world, any freedom that deserves to be called libertarian is ipso facto destroyed. That this should seem to be so is, I think, owing to misunderstandings both of human and of divine agency. A proper understanding of the two, and of the relationship between them, allows for a very robust notion of human freedom—one which, whether we choose to call it libertarian or not, is perfectly adequate to ground legitimate human responsibility, as well as to make possible a satisfying theodicy of sin. The purpose of the present chapter is to defend the first of these claims. The Case for Free Will Itisgenerallyallowedthattwoconditionsarenecessaryformorallyresponsible decision and action. The first is knowledge: to decide or act responsibly, an agent must understand the nature of the action in question and whether it is right or wrong. If one does not know what one is doing, or the moral value of it, one cannot justly be praised or blamed unless that ignorance is itself culpable—that is, unless it results from some prior moral failing on the agent’s part. The second condition is freedom: an agent is not responsible for any decision or action if it is not done freely—again provided that the failure of freedom is not a result of previous moral wrongdoing, in which case the agent would be indirectly responsible for the deed. Libertarianism may be understood as a gloss on this second condition. It holds, at a minimum, that in the sense relevant to questions of moral responsibility, decision and volition are free only if they do not occur...

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