Online research in philosophy

My article confronts three of Spinoza’s four arguments against free will in God with Aquinas’s contrary position in the Summa contra Gentiles, Book I. Spinoza’s three arguments come from his Ethics, props. XVII and XXXII. First, since free choice is always exclusive, free choice in God would leave unactualized power in God. Second, if God’s will could be different without entailing divine mutability, then a divine voluntarism would reign. Third, if God has freedom of will but his willing is his essence, the God’s essence could be otherwise. I note that these pitfalls open by assuming that the divine will bears upon creatures directly and immediately. I then show that since for Aquinas, God wills creatures by principally willing himself, none of Spinoza’s criticisms follow.

In this paper I will argue that a false assumption drives the attraction of philosophers to a divine command theory of morality. Specifically, I suggest the idea thatanything not created by God is independent of God is a misconception. The idea misleads us into thinking that our only choice in offering a theistic ground for morality is between making God bow to a standard independent of his will or God creating morality in revealing his will. Yet what is God is hardly independent of him, and in coupling a perfect being theology with the doctrine of divine simplicity we discover that God’s “reason” is God. Accordingly, obeying the truths of goodness that we humans speak of as contained in the divine wisdom hardly impugns the divine sovereignty. By modifying divine command ethics to give primacyto God’s love or justice, thinkers such as Robert M. Adams, Philip L. Quinn, and Edward J. Wierenga admit the repugnance of this picture in spite of their verbal allegiance to divine command ethics. Accordingly, they implicitly concede that basing morality on God’s sheer power should not be the preferred option for the Christian theist.

As a matter of historical fact, most philosophers and theologians who have defended traditional theistic views have been moral realists. Some "divine command" theorists have held that the good is constituted by the content of divine approval -i.e. that things are good because, and insofar as, they have divine approval. However, even amongst those theists who hold that the good is independently constituted -i.e. those who hold that God's pattern of approval is explained by the fact that he approves of all and only that which is good -the dominant meta ethic has been strongly realistic.

While denying that God has moral obligations, William Alston defends divine moral goodness based on God’s performance of supererogatory acts. The present article argues that an agent without obligations cannot perform supererogatory acts. Hence, divine moral goodness cannot be established on that basis. Defenses of divine moral obligation by Eleonore Stump and Nicholas Wolterstorff are also questioned. Against Stump, it is argued (among other things) that the temptations of Jesus do not establish the existence of a tendency to sin in a divine being. Hence, Stump’s Christological objection to Alston’s denial of divine moral obligation fails. Some counterexamples to that denial offered by Wolterstorff also fail. It is concluded that claims of divine moral goodness remain problematic.

Christian theism has traditionally claimed that God knows the future. But why is divine foreknowledge important? In this essay, I argue that divine foreknowledge is valuable to Christian theism and that a hefty theological price must be paid if it is rejected. I also attempt to show that the range of knowledge available to God in theological models that deny divine foreknowledge is significantly less than claimed by proponents of these views. In particular, I argue that the God of such models could not know future physical necessities, physical probabilities, divinely intended future free acts, or future events required by the divine nature.

Aquinas maintains that, although God created the universe, he could have created another or simply refrained from creating altogether. That Aquinas believesin divine free choice is uncontroversial. Yet doubts have been raised as to whether Thomas is entitled to this belief, given his claims concerning divine simplicity.According to simplicity, there is no potentiality in God, nor is there a distinction in God between God’s willing, His essence, and His necessary being. On the surface, it appears that these claims leave no room for divine free choice. I argue that attempts by Aquinas and a pair of his contemporary defenders to reconcile God’s freedom with God’s simplicity fail to resolve the problem. Nevertheless, I maintain that Aquinas provides the key to a resolution in his claim that while creatures are really related to God, God is not really related to creatures.

In this paper I seek to show how God's freedom is not reduced or His power diminished by His inability to be less than perfectly good even though ours would be. That ours would be explains why it might prima facie appear to us that there is a ‘conceptual tension’ between some of the claims of traditional theism and reveals some interesting (well, to me anyway) differences between human freedom and divine freedom.

One important version of the problem of divine freedom is that, if God is essentially good, and if freedom logically requires being able to do otherwise, then God is not free with respect to willing the good, and thus He is not morally praiseworthy for His goodness. I develop and defend a broadly Molinist solution to this problem, which, I argue, provides the best way out of the difficulty for orthodox theists who are unwilling to relinquish the Principle of Alternate Possibilities. The solution is that the divine essence includes the property of transworld goodness: i.e., for any possible morally significant choice that God could have faced, if God had actually faced it, God would have chosen to will the good. This view makes coherent the otherwise paradoxical theological intuition that it is within God’s power to do something evil, but He would not ever do such a thing.

Michael Bergmann and Jan Cover summarize the essence of their paper as follows: “We argue that divine responsibility is sufficient for divine thankworthiness and consistent with the absence of divine freedom. We do this while insisting on the view that both freedom and responsibility are incompatible with causal determinism.” In this response I argue that while it makes sense for believers to be thankful that God exists, it makes no sense for them to thank him for doing the best act he can, given the circumstances.

Adherents of traditional western Theism have espoused CONJUNCTION: God is essentially perfectly good and God is thankworthy for the good acts he performs. But suppose that (i) God’s essential perfect goodness prevents his good acts from being free, and that (ii) God is not thankworthy for an act that wasn’t freely performed. Together these entail the denial of CONJUNCTION. The most natural strategy for defenders of CONJUNCTION is to deny (i). We develop an argument for (i), and then identify two ways for the defender of CONJUNCTION to respond. Next we turn to a considerably different, rather less obvious route toward defending CONJUNCTION that is compatible with (i)—one which instead denies (ii). Here too we identify two ways for the defender of CONJUNCTION to proceed, yielding a total of four ways for the theist to respond. Because the last of these represents an important and underappreciated alternative for the theist, we devote the second half of the paper to developing and defending it. We argue that divine responsibility is sufficient for divine thankworthiness and consistent with the absence of divine freedom. We do this while insisting on the view that both freedom and responsibility are incompatible with causal determinism.