Not so long ago I overheard the following exchange:

Woman:  Isn’t the dining hall’s food terrible?

Man: Sometimes the dining hall has good food!  They had grits yesterday.

Woman: I don’t like grits – I hate the taste of gravy.

Man: What does grits have to do with gravy?

Woman: … ?

Grits has nothing to do with gravy.  This is an established fact.  If you think about gravy when you think about grits, then you don’t know grits.   If you think about gravy when you think about grits, then you should consult a dictionary.

Free will is like grits.  It is like grits in the following respect: when we talk about free will, some of us are likely to mean one thing and some are likely to mean another.  So some of us are likely to be wrong about free will.   Unfortunately, free will is also unlike grits.  It is unlike grits in the following respect: no one cares if you’re wrong about grits, but being wrong about free will has confounding philosophical and theological consequences.  It will be my project in this post to trace out both the confusion surrounding free will and the aforementioned confounding philosophical and theological consequences.

There is only one widely accepted definition of free will in the philosophical community.  It is cast in terms of the free will thesis, the thesis that we have free will.  To repeat a useful formulation of the free will thesis[1]: “The free-will thesis is the thesis that we are sometimes in the following position with respect to a contemplated future act: we simultaneously have both the following abilities: the ability to perform that act and the ability to refrain from performing that act.”

Grits - delicious?

There are two accepted definitions of free will in the theological community.  One of them is identical with the one just presented.  The other is rather different.  Working from the discussion of free will in a respected modern systematic theology[2], I offer the following formulation of it: “The free-will thesis is the thesis that we sometimes do what we want to do.”

To avoid confusion, when some people talk about free will they are careful to distinguish libertarian free will (the thing “free will” denotes if we have the first formulation of the free will thesis) and compatibilist free will (the thing “free will” denotes if we have the second formulation of the free will thesis).  This distinction is an unhappy one because it suggests that libertarian free will and compatibilist free will are two varieties of the same sort of thing, when in fact they are different sorts of things altogether.  If you like, we would make the same mistake if we called all frogs “green frogs” and all sheep “brown frogs.”  To avoid this confusion, I will refer to the thing denoted by “libertarian free will” as phree will and to the thing denoted by “compatibilist free will” as phrie will.

Having clarified the dispute concerning the nature of free will, it is now time to trace out its consequences.

The concept of phree will presents us with a problem.  Following van Inwagen, the problem arises from the conjunction of the following facts:

1. There are good reasons to believe that determinism is incompatible with phree will.

2. There are good reasons to believe that indeterminism is incompatible with phree will.

3. There are good reasons to believe that the existence of moral responsibility entails phree will.

4. There are good reasons to believe that moral responsibility exists.

If 3 and 4, then phree will exists.  But if 1 and 2, then phree will does not exist.  I have never met a Christian who would deny 4.  3 is both intuitive and seemingly necessary in light of accepted definitions of normative terms like “ought” and “should” (see the last three pages of van Inwagen’s paper).  But if we accept 3 and 4, we must deny either 1 or 2.  Many passages in the Bible would be easier to understand if we adopted a deterministic view of the universe.  So we might be tempted to deny 1.  But then again, the arguments for 1 are extremely convincing.

In any case, I want to highlight some facts.  First, the reason we want to have phree will is that moral responsibility seems to entail phree will.  It follows logically that denying the existence of phree will seems to be denying the existence of moral responsibility.  Second, the problem with affirming the existence of phree will is that it seems to force us give up on determinism.

Now things get squishy.  Phrie will is not incompatible with determinism.  We will often do what we want to do whether what we want to do is determined or not.  The fact that phrie will is not incompatible with determinism is generally regarded as the most attractive thing about phrie will.  But now it has become possible, returning to our confused notion of free will, to say something like this:

“Moral responsibility exists, and moral responsibility entails free will.  Therefore free will exists.  Some people have thought that free will is incompatible with determinism.  But when we think about free will, we can see that it isn’t.  So moral responsibility exists, and we have free will, and the universe is deterministic.”

We might then think that we have solved the problem of free will, when in fact we have done no such thing.  We might, in fact, continue happily for quite some time using only phrie will in our theology.  But as long as we don’t deny proposition 3 above, the problem of phree will still looms large[3].  What are the confounding philosophical and theological consequences of our confusion?  They arise from the near-certainty that we, being confused about free will, will uncritically accept theories of, for example, divine providence, divine omniscience, and salvation, that entail or presuppose determinism.  If we do this too often, we will end up with a systematic theology that rests both on the truth of the claim that the universe is deterministic and on the falsity of the same claim.  And this is just what has almost always happened.

Both pragmatically and intuitively, there must be only one free will: phree will.

[2] No One Like Him by John S. Feinberg.

[3] It is important to note that some philosophers, notably Harry Frankfurt, have denied proposition 3 above.  The issue continues to be disputed.