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Article 3: Whether Whatever God Wills He Wills Necessarily?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 November 2024
The hypothesis that God’s will is completely free, that He does not have to will what He wills, seems to present difficulties. Would it mean that His will does not have to be good or wise? That would make him an arbitrary tyrant. But the hypothesis that His will is not free, that it is compelled by necessity, that He cannot do otherwise than as He does, turns Him into a kind of Fate. Presumably even our prayers to such a God would be pointless, because for Him to respond to a prayer would be to will something different than what He would have willed had the prayer not been offered. St. Thomas distinguishes the question of whether there is anything that God wills by necessity from the question of whether He wills all that He wills by necessity. These questions turn out to have different answers.
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