Justified True Belief

(●) Thesis: free will is real, and it is the libertarian kind: when you choose, nothing before the choice settled it, and you yourself were its source. + Stand at the top of the stairs for a moment before you decide whether to go down. Nothing has happened yet. You are not watching a decision arrive; you are about to make one. Every argument that follows is about whether that moment is what it seems to be, and the answer, all the way through, is yes. (1) The whole thesis fits in one sentence. - A choice is free when it is up to the person who makes it: nothing that came before it, no prior state of the brain or the world, no decree from outside, was enough by itself to settle which way it would go, and the person himself, for reasons of his own, is what settled it. - In the ordinary case that means he could have chosen otherwise, and most of the arguments will say so. But the ability to do otherwise is the usual mark of a free choice, not its definition. What defines it is the source: nothing caused the choice but the one who made it, and that is also what separates a free choice from a random event, since a random event is caused by no one and a free choice is made by someone, for reasons he has in mind. - Philosophers call that view libertarian free will. The word has nothing to do with politics. It comes from liberty, and it names the claim that a free choice really comes from the one who makes it: in the ordinary case, a real fork in the road, not a road that only looked forked from the driver's seat. - Every argument in the sequence does one of three jobs. It establishes that freedom, or it defends that freedom against a rival account of what freedom is, or it keeps that freedom intact under a God who knows the future and governs the world. (2) The question matters because responsibility hangs on it. - We praise, blame, thank, forgive, and punish, and every one of those acts assumes that the deed was up to the person, that he and not something else settled it. Nobody blames a rock for falling. - The Bible speaks to people the same way. "I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life" (Deuteronomy 30:19). Joshua told Israel to "choose this day whom you will serve" (Joshua 24:15). A command to choose is addressed to someone who can. - If nothing is ever up to us, then the courtroom, the confession, and the whole idea of a person answering for a life are performances with no one behind them. That is a heavy price. The arguments will ask whether anything actually forces us to pay it. (3) The road runs in two stretches. - The first stretch is philosophy, and it stands on its own. It asks what a free choice is. It asks why the accounts that try to fit freedom inside a fully determined world do not deliver what anyone wanted from the word. It asks why the arguments that freedom is impossible fail, and, at the end, why it is reasonable to believe that we are free. A reader who stops there can answer, in his own words, the determinist who says nothing is up to us, the compatibilist who says we are free even so, and the neuroscientist who says the brain decided before we did. - The second stretch is theology, and it is for the reader who arrives carrying the harder question: how can a will be really free if God already knows what it will do, and rules over everything it does? The answer built there has two halves. God's knowledge does not make anything happen. And God plans the world through what free creatures would do, rather than around them. Therefore, the claim to keep in view from the first step is a short one: our choices are up to us, and God is no less God for it.

(●) The words: the whole debate runs on six terms worth meeting before you start. + Every argument teaches its own terms as it goes. But six of them come up so often that it helps to meet them first, at a kitchen table, before they show up in a syllogism. (1) Determinism says the past and the laws of nature fix everything that happens. - Determinism is the claim that, given the way the world was a moment ago and the laws that govern it, only one next moment was possible. Picture a row of dominoes. Once the first one falls, every later fall is settled, and a mind that knew the setup could read off the whole sequence in advance. - On determinism, your decision at the top of the stairs was as fixed as the tenth domino. It felt open. It was not. (2) Compatibilism says you can be free even if determinism is true. - Compatibilism holds that freedom and determinism are compatible, which is where the name comes from. A choice is free, on this view, as long as it came from you, from your own wants and your own reasoning, without a gun to your head. Whether those wants were themselves fixed by the past does not matter to the compatibilist. - Thomas Hobbes and Jonathan Edwards held this view, and so do most of the philosophers who write about free will today. It deserves its best hearing, and it gets one. The arguments answer it by asking whether "it came from you" means anything when the "you" it came from was assembled entirely from outside. (3) Libertarianism says freedom requires that determinism be false, at least where choices are made. - Libertarian free will is the thesis of the whole sequence: a free choice is settled by nothing but the person who makes it, and in the ordinary case he could have done otherwise in the very same circumstances. Aristotle, the church fathers before Augustine, Duns Scotus, Luis de Molina, Thomas Reid, and a great many Christians since have held some version of it. - You might be thinking, "But if nothing settled the choice, isn't it just random?" That is the right question, and the view does not say that choices are random. A free choice is made by someone, for reasons, and the arguments spend real time on the difference between "not settled in advance" and "a coin toss." (4) Theological determinism says God, not the laws of nature, settles every choice. - Theological determinism is the claim that God has decreed everything that comes to pass, including every human choice, so that no choice could have gone otherwise given what God has willed. It is the view of Jonathan Edwards and of most Reformed theologians today. - Here is the place for an honest sentence. The arguments that follow reject this view. They hold that God governs the world through free choices he knows in full, rather than by settling them, and that is a side taken against the determinism most Calvinists hold. - The thesis reaches one step into salvation, and the arguments say so rather than hiding it. Grace comes first; nobody turns to God without it. But the will God draws can still refuse him: "you always resist the Holy Spirit" (Acts 7:51), "you were not willing" (Matthew 23:37), "the Pharisees and the lawyers rejected the purpose of God for themselves" (Luke 7:30). Freedom of the libertarian kind is part of the response to grace, which means grace can be resisted. That is what Arminius and Wesley held, what the Council of Trent held, and what most Molinists hold today, though a Molinist can hold that grace is irresistible and a few do; it is not the Reformed view. - What the arguments do not take a side on is what the thesis does not reach: how election, God's choosing of a people, should be understood, and whether the saved can fall away. Those questions belong to the doctrine of salvation, and they are left there. A person can hold that our ordinary choices are free and still hold any of the historic views on them; some Reformed philosophers do exactly that. (5) Open theism says God does not know the future free choices of creatures. - Open theism keeps libertarian freedom and pays for it with God's foreknowledge. Since a free choice is not settled in advance, the reasoning goes, there is nothing there yet to know, so God knows the future only as a set of possibilities and takes risks like the rest of us. - The arguments refuse the trade. God is the one "declaring the end from the beginning" (Isaiah 46:10), and the whole second stretch of the road exists to show that he can know a free choice without making it. (6) Middle knowledge says God knows what every creature would freely do in any situation. - Middle knowledge is the sixteenth-century proposal of Luis de Molina, revived in our own day by Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig. Before God decides anything about creation, he already knows what any possible person would freely choose in any possible circumstance. Knowing that, he chooses which people to create and where to place them, and his plan is carried out through choices that remain entirely theirs. • It is called "middle" because it sits between two kinds of knowledge nobody disputes: God's knowledge of everything that could happen, and his knowledge of everything that will happen. In between lies what would happen, if. - David once asked God whether the men of Keilah would hand him over to Saul if he stayed in their town, and God said they would. So David left, and they never did (1 Samuel 23:11-12). God knew what free men would do in a situation that never came about. That is the picture the whole second stretch builds on. Therefore, the road ahead argues for libertarianism against determinism and compatibilism, refuses both theological determinism and open theism, and lands on middle knowledge as the account that keeps a free creature under a sovereign God.

(●) The first stretch: twelve arguments establish that we are free against everyone who says we are not. + Read them in order, because each one assumes the ones before it. The sequence is a ramp: it starts with what the words mean and ends with reasons to believe. (1) Three arguments say what freedom is and why the easy answer fails. - The first settles the definitions, what a free choice is and why praise and blame depend on it, so that nothing later has to be defined twice. • Read it: Philosophy / Free Will: What Free Will Is, and Why It Matters - The second takes up the oldest compatibilist answer, which says you were free so long as you could have done otherwise had you wanted to. The trouble is that a man whose wants were fixed for him passes that test with ease. He could have done otherwise, had he wanted, and he was never free for a moment. Doing what you want turns out not to be the same thing as being free. - The third is the Consequence Argument, the strongest reason in modern philosophy to think that freedom and determinism cannot both be true. If determinism holds, everything we do follows from the distant past together with the laws of nature. Neither of those is up to us. So, the argument concludes, neither is anything we do. • Read it: Philosophy / Free Will: If Determinism Is True, Nothing Is Up to Us (2) Three arguments answer the modern compatibilists at their strongest. - Next comes the famous thought experiment about a neurosurgeon who stands ready to force a choice and, as it happens, never has to, because the person chooses as the surgeon wanted anyway. The compatibilist says this shows the ability to do otherwise never mattered. The answer shows why the open door still matters even when nobody walks through it. - After that come the two best modern accounts of what makes a choice "your own." One looks at whether you want the wants you act on; the other looks at whether you respond to reasons. Both get a fair hearing, and both turn out to share a weakness. A person could be handed either one whole, from outside, the right wants and the right responsiveness to reasons included, and nobody would call that person free. So neither account can be what freedom is. - Then the manipulation argument. A person built to order by a scientist, so that he will choose exactly as designed, is not free, and everyone agrees about that. A fully determined world differs from the scientist's laboratory in only one respect: nobody is at the controls. The argument asks why that difference should be the one that matters. (3) Three arguments meet the claim that freedom is impossible. - The first builds the positive account, which philosophers call agent causation: a free choice is caused by the person, not merely by states inside the person such as a desire or a brain event. That is exactly why it is neither fixed in advance nor random. Something caused it, and the something was you. - The second answers the luck objection, which says that a choice nothing settled in advance is just a coin toss, and asks how a coin toss could be anyone's responsibility. It also introduces the regress argument of Galen Strawson: to be responsible for a choice, you would have to be responsible for the character that produced it, and for whatever produced that, all the way down, and nobody chose his own character all the way down. - The third takes that regress and gives it the full hearing it deserves. It is the hardest argument against everyone, since it is aimed at compatibilists and libertarians alike, and an argument that would sink every account of responsibility is not answered in a paragraph. (4) Three arguments give the reasons to believe we are free. - The first clears the ground by answering the brain-scan experiments that claim to find the decision in the brain before the person is aware of deciding, and says what those experiments actually measured. - The second collects the positive case, and there is more of it than most people expect. There is the experience of choosing itself. There is the fact that belief in freedom is basic and instinctive, the kind of belief nobody argues his way into. There is the fact that we know we are responsible more surely than we know any philosophical premise that could be turned against it. And there is the way Scripture addresses people who could answer either way. - The third runs the deliberation argument on its own. Nobody can deliberate about an outcome he believes is already settled; you do not weigh whether to catch a train that has already left. And everybody deliberates, including the determinist deciding whether to be one. Therefore, a reader who stops at the end of the first stretch can say what a free choice is, answer the determinist, the compatibilist, and the neuroscientist, and give reasons of his own for believing that the moment at the top of the stairs is real.

(●) The second stretch: thirteen arguments keep that freedom under a God who knows everything and governs everything. + The Christian reader arrives with a further question, and it is a harder one. If God knows what I will do before I do it, and if he rules everything that happens, in what sense is anything up to me? (1) Four arguments engage the Reformed case at full strength. - The first separates the two things "free will" has meant in the church, because a good deal of the quarrel is two sides using one phrase for two different things. When the Reformers said the will is in bondage, they meant that nobody turns to God without grace, and about that they were right; the Second Council of Orange had said it a thousand years before them, and Arminius and Wesley said it after them. But it is a claim about the fallen will's power toward God, not a denial that ordinary choices are up to us, and the argument adds the step the Reformers did not take: the will God draws can still refuse him, so freedom reaches into the response to grace itself. Luther himself granted free choice in what he called the things beneath a man, the everyday business of life, and kept his denial for the things above him, meaning the will's power toward God. • Read it: Philosophy / Free Will: The Bondage of the Will Is Not the Denial of Free Will - The second takes up the old maxim that "ought implies can," the principle that a command presupposes the ability to obey it, and asks what a command really presupposes. That is where the Reformed objection lands: we are commanded to live without sin, we cannot, and so, the objection runs, "ought" cannot imply "can." The answer uses the distinction the first argument drew, between what a fallen will can do toward God and what an ordinary will can do at the top of the stairs. - The third argues against theological determinism directly. The Reformed case is stated first and at full strength, and then the question the whole dispute turns on is put plainly: if God decreed a sin, who is its author? - The fourth reads the sovereignty texts one at a time: Pharaoh's hardened heart; Joseph's brothers, who "meant evil" while "God meant it for good" (Genesis 50:20); the cross, "delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God" and carried out "by the hands of lawless men" (Acts 2:23). For each one it asks what the text says and what it does not. (2) Four arguments answer the foreknowledge worry from every side. - The first shows that God's knowing what you will do does not make you do it. The argument that it does commits a mistake in logic with a name, the modal fallacy: it slides the word "necessarily" from where it belongs (necessarily, if God knows a thing, that thing happens) to where it does not (if God knows a thing, that thing necessarily happens). The plain answer is as old as Origen. A thing is not going to happen because God foreknows it; God foreknows it because it is going to happen. • Read it: Philosophy / Free Will: God's Knowing What You Will Do Does Not Make You Do It - The second answers open theism, which drops foreknowledge to keep freedom, and shows that the Bible and reason both refuse the trade. - The third asks how foreknowledge of a free choice is even possible, given that the choice has not been made yet. The answer is that God does not learn the future by looking ahead, as if it were a road he could see from a tower. His knowledge is not acquired at all. - The fourth asks whether it makes any difference if God is outside time, seeing every moment at once, or in time with us, and shows that freedom stands either way. (3) Two arguments build the account that holds it all together. - The first builds middle knowledge, God's knowledge of what every creature would freely do in every circumstance, and shows how a God with that knowledge can plan the world in detail without determining a single choice in it. • Read it: Philosophy / Free Will: God Knows What You Would Freely Do, and Plans Around It - The second answers the hardest objection to it, the one philosophers call the grounding objection: a free choice that has not been made yet has nothing to make any claim about it true, so what could God's knowledge of it be knowledge of? (4) Three arguments finish on the freedom of God and of the saints. - The first meets the best theological argument for the compatibilist, and it is a good one. God cannot sin, and he is praised for his goodness; so praise, it seems, does not require the ability to do otherwise. The answer is that God's freedom and ours are the same freedom with one difference. Nothing outside God gave him his character. Ours was shaped by parents, places, and a thousand things we never chose, and that is the difference the argument works out. - The second asks whether God was free to create at all, and free to create this world rather than a better one. - The third closes on heaven, where the saints cannot sin and are freer than they have ever been, and on the freedom of God himself, so that the reader sees at the end what freedom was for all along. "So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed" (John 8:36). Therefore, the second stretch ends where it began, with a will that is really free, and adds what only theology can add: that it is free under a God who knew every choice it would make and made a world in which it would make them.

(●) Where it lands: free will of the libertarian kind, real in us now, known in full by God, and finished only in heaven, in a will that cannot sin and does not want to. + A road should say where it ends before you set out on it. Here is the end. (1) The destination is a definite position. - Our choices are up to us. Nothing before a free choice settles it; the person does, and in the ordinary case he could have chosen otherwise. That is why praise and blame have someone to land on. - God knows every choice that will ever be made, and every choice that would be made in any circumstance that never comes about, and his knowing changes nothing about whose choice it is. - God governs the world by choosing which free creatures to create and where to place them, knowing what they would do. His purposes are carried out through their choices rather than around them. (2) Every opponent gets his best case stated first. - The strongest case against this position in the church today is the Reformed one. Every argument that refuses it states that case first, in its best form and from its best defenders, before answering. A reader who holds the Reformed view will find his own position described in words he would sign, and only then find out where the disagreement really sits. - The same courtesy goes to the compatibilist philosopher, the hard determinist, the open theist, and the neuroscientist. An argument that wins by weakening its opponent has not won. (3) Three things are not being claimed. - Scripture does not state a theory of the will. It addresses people as accountable and confesses God as sovereign, and the position defended is a way of holding both of those at once, not a doctrine the Bible spells out. - Middle knowledge is a model of how foreknowledge, freedom, and providence fit together. If it fell, the foreknowledge answer would still stand and freedom would still be real; God's providence would only reach less far than the model says. - Whether God is timeless or everlasting in time, how election should be read, and whether the saved can fall away all belong to the doctrines of God and of salvation, and the arguments leave them there. What they do say about salvation is one thing, said once: grace comes first, and grace can be refused. Therefore, read the arguments in order, hold each opponent's case in mind the way the arguments hold it, and expect to arrive at a freedom that is real, known, governed, and one day made perfect.