#779 Can God Command What He Does Not Will?

Dr. craig’s response

Whoa, this is a very interesting question, about which I’d like to think some more! It has important implications, I think, for two different accounts of theistic ethics, what we can call Divine Command Theory and Divine Will Theory. According to Divine Command Theory, God’s commands to us constitute our moral duties. But according to Divine Will Theory, it’s God’s will for us that constitutes our moral duties. It might be thought that these two theories are practically equivalent, with God’s will simply underlying His commands. But your question suggests that these two theories could on occasion come apart.

Suppose God knows via His middle knowledge that if He issued a command to us reflecting His will, we would in fact disobey it, so that His will would not be done. This must happen a lot, given our sinful dispositions! But now suppose that He knows that if He were to issue a different command that does not in fact reflect His will, then we would disobey it and do what He really wanted us to do all along! By issuing a command that does not really reflect His will, God could get us to freely do His true will. Such a situation seems perfectly plausible, but nevertheless a little crazy. How can God command us to do something He does not will?

Well, Molinists have always distinguished between God’s absolute or unconditional will and His conditional will. For example, He wills unconditionally that in every moral situation in which we find ourselves we do the right thing. But His conditional will may be to place us in situations where He knew we would not do the right thing in order to achieve some overriding purpose. For example, it is God’s unconditional will that Pontius Pilate be a just ruler who treats Jesus with justice; but it is God’s conditional will to allow Pilate to condemn Christ unjustly for the sake of our redemption via his atoning death on the cross.

Now given that distinction, why couldn’t we say that in some cases, God’s unconditional will would issue in a certain command, but that His conditional will would issue a different command? Suppose, to borrow your illustration, that God knew that if He commanded the Israelites to slay all the Cannaanites opposing Israel’s army, Israel would disobey His command and let some live, which is His true will. (I don’t believe this; it’s just for the sake of illustration!) So He gives Israel a command that doesn’t represent His unconditional will, knowing that thereby His will would be accomplished through their sinful disobedience. Had He issued a command expressing His unconditional will, e.g., slay only some of the Canaanites, then the Israelites would have disobeyed His command and killed them all, thereby subverting God’s unconditional will. So God could on occasion issue commands that He doesn’t really want people to obey.

If this is right, it exposes a real weakness in Divine Will Theory that I’m not sure anybody has seen before. For on the Divine Will Theory, we may find ourselves wondering, when God commands us to do something, “Is this really God’s will? Maybe not! Then I’m not obligated to obey God’s command!” We would be constantly second-guessing God, which could lead to our rationalizing disobedience and sinful behavior. But on a Divine Command Theory, our moral duties are constituted by God’s commands, period. We shouldn’t be trying to “look behind the curtain” to discern God’s true will. Rather we are obligated to do whatever He commands us. Thus, your question seems to show the superiority of a Divine Command Theory of ethics.

On the other hand, the Divine Will theorist might well respond that while the above scenario shows that God has the capacity to issue commands that He does not want us to obey, nevertheless it would be duplicitous on His part to do so, and so the scenario is, in fact, metaphysically impossible because it is inconsistent with God’s moral nature. In discussions of divine omnipotence philosophers sometimes distinguish between the strength of God’s power and the range of His power. There are things which lie outside the range of what God can do because they would be inconsistent with His essential nature, even though God has the strength to do them (e.g., breaking His promises). So here: one might argue that though God has the capacity to issue commands that He does not want us to obey, doing so would contradict His essential moral character and therefore is impossible.