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

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Paul L. Manata © 2011
philosophical thesis which states that for everything that ever happens there are
conditions such that, given them, nothing else could happen.” 38 Robert Kane
elaborates,
In more familiar terms, we say that a determined event is inevitable or
necessary (it cannot but occur), given the determining conditions. If fate
decreed or God foreordained (or the laws of nature or antecedent causes
determined) that John would choose at a certain time to go to Samarra,
then John will choose at that time to go to Samarra. Determinism is thus a
kind of necessity, but it is a conditional necessity. A determined event
does not have to occur, no matter what else happens (it need not be
absolutely necessary). But it must occur when the determining conditions
have occurred. If the decrees of [God] had been different or the past had
been different in some way, John may have been determined to go to
Damascus rather than to Samarra. Historical doctrines of determinism
imply that every event, or at least every human choice and action, is
determined by some determining conditions in this sense. 39
On this understanding of determinism conjoined with RT, it becomes easy to see
why almost everyone who has thought deeply about these matters—Reformed
and non-­‐Reformed—has called Reformed theology a species of determinism. But
what about Reformed theologians who have claimed Reformed theology is not
deterministic, like those cited in 1.2.1? I suggest that those Reformed theologians
who have said that Reformed theology is not deterministic can be understood,
then, to be operating with some special sense of determinism: perhaps
occasionalism, naturalistic causal determinism, absolute necessitation or logical
38 Richard Taylor, “Determinism,” in Paul Edwards ed. The Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, v.2 (Macmillan, 1972), p. 359.
39 Robert Kane, A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will (Oxford University Press,
2005), p. 6, emphasis original.