Free Will, Moral Responsibility, and Reformed Theology - Analytic ...

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16 Paul L. Manata © 2011 making her decision to stay home for the day. Suppose further that a hypnotist “planted a seed” in Frieda’s mind to make her want to stay home and break her promise. Upon waking she decides to stay home. In this case the decision did not “originate” in her. To be sure, determinism does not entail we are all hypnotized to do what we do, but it does seem to entail that our choices and actions do not originate in us in any ultimate sense. Determined agents are sources of their actions, even important sources, but they are not ultimate sources. Rather, past history and the laws of nature—conditions which obtain prior to and independently of determined agents—are the ultimate sources of their actions. 2.4 RT and the threat of determinism The foregoing problems become more acute when we wonder whether RT might issue in a threat of determinism. For now, suppose it does. That is, suppose that God’s decree is necessary and sufficient for anything that happens to happen. Suppose that given God’s decree, identical results will obtain in all possible worlds that have identical decrees. This entails that no one can do other than God decrees. Suppose further that the ultimate source of all that happens is God’s decree grounded in his will. For Frieda, this means that she could not do otherwise than break the promise, and her desire to break the promise did not ultimately originate in her. Yet, Reformed Christians (and God!) would still want to say that she freely refrained from feeding the fish and that she is morally culpable for breaking her promise. Generalizing from this arbitrary case to more problematic cases the above means that if some people end up in hell they could not have done otherwise and they are not the ultimate sources or originators of their actions. The same applies with minor changes to all the evil in the world, yet Reformed believers would want to say that God is not the author of sin and that the sinner is morally culpable for his or her actions.
17 Paul L. Manata © 2011 In light of the above, we can see why some would not want to call Reformed theology deterministic. We can also see why some have strongly reacted to teachings that appear to entail deterministic consequences. With the desire to get God off the hook for evil, and to lay proper blame at the feet of man, some Reformed theologians have affirmed deterministic sounding doctrines and yet denied that Reformed theology is deterministic. At times it seems it is thought that if we simply refuse to call Reformed theology a kind of “determinism,” then it is not a kind of determinism. Or, we sometimes hear that while RT seems deterministic, man has a freedom incompatible with determinism and these two truths are held together in tension, resulting in an “antinomy.” Put differently, some might claim both that given God’s decree no one can do otherwise and given God’s decree we still can do otherwise. In light of the above, we can understand the motive to distance Reformed theology from determinism, but in our attempts to do so we often claim a position that sounds at odds with RT and cause those outside the Reformed tradition to write us off as simply confused people who want to have their cake and eat it too. It is the position of this paper that Reformed theology is a kind of determinism and thus will require a kind of freedom and moral responsibility compatible with this. As the paper progresses I will introduce more philosophical terms that are employed in this topic, and I will bold them as I have in this section. I hope this will clarify matters in the minds of many Reformed Christians, and it will be clear that a lot of room is left for debate within the Reformed tradition on how best to understand these matters. This allows freedom of conscience to develop models of the kind of determinism and compatibilism at work here. This freedom is required because the Bible does not present us with the specifics of either, and so presenting models is largely the job of philosophical theology. At this point in
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