Chapter 6 - The Incompatibility of Universal, Determinate Divine Action with Human Free Will

Summary

Is it consistent to maintain that human free will is incompatible with determinism in the natural world while also maintaining that it is compatible with divine universal causation? On the face of it, divine universal causation looks like a form of determinism. And the intuitions that lead to incompatibilism about free will and natural determinism also lead to incompatibilism about free will and divine determinism. W. Matthews Grant resists this conclusion. Grant contends that we can understand all of God’s activity as an exercise of divine “libertarian” free will and can construe God’s actions as nothing over and above the (created) effects brought about. I argue that Grant’s attempted reconciliation of human free will and universal divine causation fails, and on two counts. First, Grant’s account of the interaction of divine and created agency is occasionalist; second, even if we assume Grant’s account successfully avoids the charge of occasionalism, it fails to reconcile divine agency with created free agency. The latter is illustrated by exploring the nature of the determination relation required by incompatibilist, agent-causal accounts of free will.