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More Questions on Free Will

November 10, 2009     Time: 00:31:53
More Questions on Free Will

Summary

Conversation with William Lane Craig.

Transcript More Questions on Free Will

 

[Before the discussion starts, an interview with a leader of Reasonable Faith is conducted. The actual podcast discussion, and this transcript, picks up at the 15 minute 16 second mark.]

Kevin Harris: All right then, let’s get to some questions. We get them at ReasonableFaith.org. Thank you for your questions. We have three questions here, Dr. Craig, on our freedom – freedom of the will. These come up quite a lot – that and the moral argument. Those questions come up a lot. This question says,

Dr. Craig, am I right in saying that on a compatibilist account of human freedom [and we will define that in just a moment], all of God’s knowledge can be reduced to either natural knowledge or free knowledge. Because given a deterministic account of human freedom, there is no contingency involved in human action.

Boy, that is a mouth full!

Dr. Craig: [laughter] I know! I’m sure a lot of listeners will say, “What?!”

Kevin Harris: I just glazed over. But let’s start with compatibilism. What is that view?

Dr. Craig: This is the view that freedom is compatible with being causally determined to do what you do. So you do something at best voluntarily in the sense that it is not as though you are forced kicking and screaming to do what you do. You do it voluntarily, but nevertheless you are causally determined to do it by factors outside of yourself. That would be a compatibilist view of freedom.

Kevin Harris: OK. So he says,

On a compatibilist account of human freedom . . .

By the way, would you consider yourself a compatibilist?

Dr. Craig: No, I wouldn’t. I would think that if you are causally determined to do something then you don’t do it freely. It is not enough for the action to be voluntary. It needs to be not causally determined by factors outside yourself.

Kevin Harris: OK. Now, if one were a compatibilist, would all of God’s knowledge be reduced to either natural knowledge or free knowledge?

Dr. Craig: Well, we need to define what we mean by those terms: natural knowledge and free knowledge. What he is referring to here is the doctrine of middle knowledge. Louis Molina, who is the father of this doctrine, distinguished three different moments, logically, within God’s knowledge.

God’s natural knowledge is God’s knowledge of all necessary truths. For example, 2+2=4 or “anything that has a shape has a size” or “anything that begins to exist has a cause.” These are metaphysically necessary truths that belong to God’s natural knowledge. This knowledge is essential to God. He could not have lacked it because these are truths or propositions that could not have been false.

God’s middle knowledge is his knowledge of subjunctive conditionals concerning what human agents would freely do in any circumstances God might place them. For example, he knows the truth of the proposition, “If Barry Goldwater had been elected president, he would have won the Vietnam War.” God knows whether that is true or false – that subjective conditional. That is called middle knowledge.

Then, according to Molina, on the basis of his middle knowledge and his natural knowledge, God decrees to create a certain world – to actualize a particular world.

Then God has what Molina called free knowledge of the world that actually exists. This is called free knowledge because it is not essential to God. God could have created a different world, and in that case he would have had different knowledge. For example, God knows that Kevin Harris is the voice of Reasonable Faith. But if he had created a world in which you didn’t exist, he would not have known that truth. He would have known some other truth instead. So free knowledge is knowledge that God has of the actual world that he might have lacked.

The question is basically “If everything is determined – if there is no freedom of the will – then is there any middle knowledge or is everything just natural knowledge or free knowledge? I would say that the answer to that is yes. If there is no freedom of the will – if freedom of the will is not possible (that is to say, if everything is necessarily causally determined) then everything that God knows is either natural knowledge (necessary truths) or it is free knowledge – it is the contingent truths that God has determined to happen. So if you eat pizza for lunch, that is true because God determined it, not because you freely chose it. [1] God determined that you would eat pizza for lunch. Anything that appears to be a free choice is actually determined by God. So on this view, there really are no subjunctive conditions of freedom or as they are sometimes called counterfactuals of freedom. There aren’t any such things. So there wouldn’t be any middle knowledge – there would just be natural knowledge and free knowledge.

Kevin Harris: So Molina was really trying to answer the questions that arise among the tension between God’s sovereignty and what God determines and the fact that God wants to somehow preserve our freedom and our free will.

Dr. Craig: That is exactly right. Molina was an unrelenting libertarian about freedom. He was not a compatibilist. He believed that human beings have significant freedom to act as they choose independent of being causally determined. Certainly there are causal antecedents of our choices but they are not so specific as to determine everything that we choose and do. Molina believed that we have significant freedom to choose as we will among various options. So he wanted to reconcile this with God’s sovereignty by saying prior to his divine decree to create a world, God knew how different people would freely choose in different situations he might place them in. Therefore, by choosing to create certain situations and place certain people in them God knew exactly how they would freely choose. That is how he has foreknowledge in the actual world. So on libertarian freedom, there is this type of knowledge called middle knowledge that doesn’t seem to play any role if you deny human freedom and think that everything that we choose and do is simply determined by God’s choice.

Kevin Harris: Molina took his vitamins [laughter] apparently. His insight I think is just unbelievably profound.

Dr. Craig: It is so subtle. When you think that he wrote this in the last part of the 1500s, it is late medieval thought and yet it is so, so powerful and so subtle. It is remarkable testimony to his genius.

Kevin Harris: Here’s another question along the same lines.

Dr. Craig, how does a libertarian understand totally depravity?

Now, we just defined libertarian, we might want to go over that again – what we mean by if someone is a libertarian.

Dr. Craig: This would be someone who thinks that our choices are not causally determined by factors outside of ourselves. They can be causally shaped by these antecedent factors, but they are not determined. For example, I am not free to begin speaking Vietnamese right now because I don’t have the causal antecedents of having learned Vietnamese. It is not within my ability to suddenly do that. But I would have the ability to freely begin to speak German right now because I do have that in my background. But I am not determined to begin speaking German or English right now. I can make a choice. I have it within my ability to make that free decision. That would be the libertarian view of freedom.

Kevin Harris: How does a libertarian understand total depravity? We need to define total depravity as well.

Dr. Craig: The doctrine of total depravity does not mean that man is as evil as he can possibly be, that he is totally depraved in the sense that he is utterly evil and as bad as can possibly be. Rather, it means that there is no facet of human being that is untainted by sin. It is total in the extent of its influence over man. I think the best analogy I ever heard of this would be a drop of ink which is placed in a glass of water. The water doesn’t become totally black – it is not as black as it can be. But nevertheless, the ink diffuses itself throughout the entire glass of water. The water is totally affected by the ink. So that is what total depravity means. Sin affects every aspect of the human personality and human being.

Kevin Harris: I believe it was Norm Geisler that said the image of God is effaced in mankind but not erased. We can still see glimmers of it despite the fall.

Dr. Craig: That was a significant debate between Catholic and Protestant theologians, whether or not the image of God in man was completely annihilated in virtue of the fall. I would say something I think quite similar that man is still in the image of God in that we are persons and are capable of relating to God but our relationship with him has ruptured. [2] So I would say that the libertarian would understand the doctrine of total depravity in exactly the same way that I just enunciated it; namely, sin affects every area of the human personality. But it doesn’t mean we are black as can be; that we are totally evil. It means that our will is also affected by our fallenness and our sin.

Kevin Harris: When I look around at the world, I can see that we live in a fallen world but I can also see kind of what’s left and God’s blessings despite the fall.

Dr. Craig: Oh, yes.

Kevin Harris: Man’s progress by the grace of God that we should have had a long time ago had it not bee for the fall. It wouldn’t have been an issue. I look out the window now and I see the beauty of God’s world even though I can also see some litter down on the street.

Dr. Craig: And you see it in other persons. When you see those films or hear those stories of those firefighters that were going up the stairs in the World Trade Center when others were fleeing down the stairs, you cannot help but see the nobility and the courage and the goodness of man, even in fallen creatures. I am sure that many of those firefighters were not Christians and yet gave their lives out of a sense of duty to their fellow human beings. Certainly you do see the goodness and the nobility of man clearly, even in his fallenness.

Kevin Harris: Let’s do one more Dr. Craig and tackle this one. It says,

Dr. Craig, how should we understand original sin philosophically? It doesn’t seem to make sense that we are held responsible for another person’s actions. [In other words, because of what Adam and Eve did we are held responsible.] If we utilize middle knowledge, we can say that God knows that if we were in a similar circumstance to Adam and Eve we would have acted as they did. But it seems strange to think that God judges us by what we would do instead of what we actually do. In this case, God might know that given a different set of circumstances, we would not have received Christ. This seems that it would result in some strange theological conundrums.

Dr. Craig: It certainly would, and I completely agree with him that God cannot judge us on the basis of what we would have done under different circumstances rather than what we actually do. Under other circumstances, I might have been a Nazi war criminal or a murderer. But I am not held responsible for that because I didn’t actually do those things. So I completely agree with him that God would not judge us on the basis of true counterfactuals about us – how we would have acted.

Nevertheless, I think that these counterfactuals can play a role in understanding the doctrine of original sin. It seems to me that what is essential to understanding the doctrine of original sin is the concept of imputation. This is the idea that guilt or responsibility for an action can be imputed to another person from the person who actually did it. I was once talking with an insurance salesman about the Gospel, sharing my faith with him. As I described how Christ died on the cross for our sins he said to me, “Oh, that’s imputation.” I was shocked because I thought, “How does this businessman know about the theological concept of imputation of sin?” And he said, “Oh, we use imputation all the time in the insurance industry.” He described to me how you can have certain policies; for example, on your automobile where if somebody else drives your car and gets in a wreck, the responsibility for the damage is imputed to you rather than the person who was actually driving. So imputation was a very familiar concept to this man because of his work in insurance. That, I think, lies as the heart of the doctrine of original sin. Adam was our representative before God. He was the federal head of the human race and acted on our behalf before God. It would be, again, as though a proxy voted on your behalf at a stock holders’ meeting. You authorized someone to act as your proxy and what he votes is actually your vote because of his proxy relationship to you. Similarly, Adam, I think, was our proxy before God. He was our representative before God in the actions that he took in falling into sin. [3] Lest anyone would say, “Well, I don’t want him as my representative” or “He doesn’t represent me” that’s where I think the counterfactuals would come in. Namely, what is true is if we were in Adam’s situation, we would have acted exactly the same way and therefore he is capable of serving as our proxy and representative. He does not misrepresent us before God. So, the reader is right in that God does not judge us on the basis of how we would have acted in other circumstances. But I think that how we would have acted in those circumstances in which Adam found himself is relevant to whether Adam is able to act as our proxy – whether he faithfully represents us before God and therefore serves as our federal head. So I think it is basically the doctrine of imputation that serves here as the basis for the sort of corporate fall of humanity in Adam’s fall. [4]