Free Will and God's Universal Causality: The Dual Sources Account (Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy of Religion)

The traditional doctrine of God's universal causality holds that God directly causes all entities distinct from himself, including all creaturely actions. But can our actions be free in the strong, libertarian sense if they are directly caused by God? W. Matthews Grant argues that free creaturely acts have __dual sources__, God and the free creaturely agent, and are ultimately up to both in a way that leaves all the standard conditions for libertarian freedom satisfied. Offering a comprehensive alternative to existing approaches for combining theism and libertarian freedom, he proposes new solutions for reconciling libertarian freedom with robust accounts of God's providence, grace, and predestination. He also addresses the problem of moral evil without the commonly employed Free Will Defense. Written for analytic philosophers and theologians, Grant's approach can be characterized as “neo-scholastic” as well as “analytic,” since many of the positions defended are inspired by, consonant with, and develop resources drawn from the scholastic tradition, especially Aquinas. Cover 1 Contents 6 Acknowledgments 8 1 Introduction 10 1.1 Divine Universal Causality (DUC) and Creaturely Action 10 1.2 Libertarian Freedom and the Apparent Conflict with DUC 14 1.3 Dual Sources: A Neo-scholastic Approach to Resolving the Conflict 19 2 God: Universal Cause and Cause of Human Actions 24 2.1 Scripture 24 2.2 Perfect Being Theology: An Anselmian Approach 31 2.3 Cosmological Arguments from Contingency 33 2.4 Conservation and Concurrence: A Suarezian Argument 34 2.5 A Thomistic Argument from Participation 38 3 Divine Universal Causality and the Threat of Occasionalism 44 3.1 Does DUC Render Creaturely Causes Otiose? 44 3.2 God and Creaturely Causes: The Claims of Non-Occasionalist DUC 46 3.3 Non-Occasionalist DUC: The Metaphysical Objection 50 3.4 Non-Occasionalist DUC: The Epistemic Objection 54 3.5 Can Agent-causal Acts Be Caused by God? 57 4 Free Creatures of the Universal Cause 62 4.1 The Intrinsic/Extrinsic Distinction 62 4.2 Why DUC May Appear to Preclude Libertarian Freedom 63 4.3 The Extrinsic Model of Divine Agency 65 4.4 DUC without Determinism 69 4.5 Ability to Do Otherwise 74 4.6 Ultimate Responsibility 77 4.7 Dual Sources 79 5 The Extrinsic Model Defended 84 5.1 The Extrinsic Model, Intrinsic Models, and Scholastic Theology 84 5.2 From DUC to the Extrinsic Model 89 5.3 But Is the Extrinsic Model Also Ruled Out by DUC? 96 5.4 Does the Extrinsic Model Render Divine Causality Unintelligible? 101 6 Does God Cause Sin? 108 6.1 DUC, Moral Evil, and the Privation Solution 108 6.2 Moral Evil and Privation 112 6.3 Objections to the Privation Account of Moral Evil 117 6.4 Does God Cause the Badness in Sinful Acts Simply by Causing the Acts? 121 6.5 How the Badness in Sinful Acts Is Caused by the Sinner Alone 123 7 The Problem of Moral Evil 128 7.1 The Failure of the Free Will Defense 128 7.2 Responding to the Problem without FWD 133 7.3 Moral Evil, Dual Sources, and Molinism 135 7.4 Moral Evil, Dual Sources, and Open Theism 137 7.5 Sin and the Divine Will 143 7.6 God’s Involvement in Sin: A Cost of Dual Sources? 149 8 Providence, Grace, and Predestination 154 8.1 An Extrinsic Model of Divine Knowing 154 8.2 Time, Foreknowledge, and a Variation on the Eternity Solution 159 8.3 Providence 164 8.4 Grace 167 8.5 Divine–Human Dialogue 175 8.6 Predestination 180 Notes 191 Bibliography 240 Index 252 "The traditional doctrine of God's universal causality holds that God directly causes all entities distinct from himself, including all creaturely actions. But can our actions be free in the strong, libertarian sense if they are directly caused by God? W. Matthews Grant argues that free creaturely acts have dual sources, God and the free creaturely agent, and are ultimately up to both in a way that leaves all the standard conditions for libertarian freedom satisfied. Offering a comprehensive alternative to existing approaches for combining theism and libertarian freedom, he proposes new solutions for reconciling libertarian freedom with robust accounts of God's providence, grace, and predestination. He also addresses the problem of moral evil without the commonly employed Free Will Defense. Written for analytic philosophers and theologians, Grant's approach can be characterized as "neo-scholastic" as well as "analytic," since many of the positions defended are inspired by, consonant with, and develop resources drawn from the scholastic tradition, especially Aquinas."--Bloomsbury Publishing. How much control do we have over the way we act? If we commit evil, is God to blame? What are the limits of free will? In this book, W. Matthews Grant attempts to answer the above questions, and many more. Arguing that human behaviours are driven by both divine causality and our own human impetus, he demonstrates that the standard conditions for libertarian freedom are nonetheless satisfied. Grant offers a comprehensive alternative to the classic approaches for combining theism and libertarian freedom. He addresses the problem of moral evil without the commonly employed Free Will Defense, and proposes new solutions for reconciling libertarian freedom with robust accounts of God’s providence and predestination. In particular, Grant draws on the work of canonical philosophers including Anselm, Aquinas and Suarez. Of particular interest to analytic theologians and philosophers of religion, Free Will and God’s Universal Causality: The Dual Sources Account presents a new account of the connections between divine causality and freedom