Free Will and Religion

What Is

Free will and religion examines the tension between the claim that human beings choose freely and the claims that religious traditions make about God. Three divine attributes generate the problem. If God is omniscient, then God knows in advance what we will choose; if God is omnipotent and sovereign, then perhaps everything that happens, including our choices, falls under God's will or decree; and if God is provident, then God orders all things toward an end. Each of these seems to threaten the idea that our choices are genuinely ours, and with it the moral and religious significance of human action.

The problem is not merely theoretical. Religious traditions teach that we are responsible for sin, that we can merit or demerit, and that we can cooperate with grace; but responsibility presupposes freedom. If our choices are fixed by God's knowledge or decree, praise and blame appear pointless, and the religious life itself — the choice to believe, to repent, to love — seems emptied of meaning. The philosophical task is to explain how divine sovereignty and human freedom can both be real.

It is important to distinguish the versions of the problem. The problem of foreknowledge asks how God's knowledge of the future can coexist with the openness of our choices. The problem of predestination asks how God's eternal decision — especially the decision of who will be saved — can coexist with human merit and responsibility. The problem of providence asks how God's ordering of all events can leave room for genuine contingency. The solutions offered to these problems define the great divide between libertarian and compatibilist theologies.

Historical Background

The Christian tradition confronted the problem early. Augustine defended free choice of the will in his dialogue of that name, arguing that nothing is so much in our power as the will itself, and that God's foreknowledge of our choices does not compel them: God knows what we will do, but we still do it by willing. In his later anti-Pelagian writings, however, Augustine emphasized grace and predestination, teaching that fallen humanity cannot choose the good without grace, and that God elects some to salvation. The tension between these two strands — the affirmation of freedom and the sovereignty of grace — runs through the whole subsequent history of the problem.

Thomas Aquinas systematized the solution. In the Summa Theologica he argued that God's foreknowledge, like all knowledge, does not cause its objects, and that divine causality works through, not against, creaturely causes: God causes free agents to act freely. Aquinas also distinguished the necessity of the consequent (if God knows it, it will happen) from the necessity of the consequent's being (that it happens necessarily), arguing that only the former follows from foreknowledge, and that it does not destroy freedom.

The Reformation sharpened the issue. Martin Luther and John Calvin, building on Augustine's later teaching, affirmed a strong doctrine of predestination and argued that God's decree does not destroy human responsibility, since God ordains both the end and the means, including our free choices. The Council of Trent and subsequent Catholic theology insisted on the cooperation of free will with grace. Modern philosophers of religion have developed the same options with new tools, including the "open theism" that denies exhaustive foreknowledge of free choices, and sophisticated accounts of God's timeless knowledge that follow Boethius and Aquinas.

Key Concepts

Divine foreknowledge. God's knowledge of future events, including future free choices. The philosophical problem is whether such knowledge makes the future necessary in a way incompatible with freedom.

Predestination. The doctrine that God has eternally decreed the salvation of some and (in its double form) the reprobation of others. It intensifies the foreknowledge problem by making freedom and merit seem irrelevant to salvation.

Providence. God's ordering of all things toward their ends. The problem of providence is to explain how this ordering can be compatible with genuine contingency and free action.

Foreknowledge and necessity. Augustine's and Boethius's solution: God's timeless knowledge sees our free choices as they are; it does not cause or necessitate them, because the necessity is only "of the consequent," not "of the consequent's being."

Free will theism and open theism. Contemporary views holding that God's foreknowledge is limited by the genuine freedom of creatures — either because free choices are not yet settled facts, or because God voluntarily refrains from knowing what we will choose.

Contemporary Relevance

The debate between free will and religion is not confined to theology. Courts and legislatures confront the problem when religious believers claim that their choices were compelled by God's will; ethicists debate whether moral responsibility is compatible with a divinely governed universe; and the "new atheism" of writers such as Sam Harris uses the free will problem as an argument against religious morality, claiming that determinism dissolves both sin and desert. Philosophers of religion respond by distinguishing the logical problem of foreknowledge from the causal problem of determinism, arguing that the former is more tractable than the latter.

The ancient solutions remain live options. The Boethian account of God's timeless knowledge has been revived in sophisticated contemporary form by philosophers such as Eleonore Stump and William Lane Craig; open theism has developed the alternative that God knows the future as open because free choices are genuinely unsettled. The debate thus continues, with the tools of analytic philosophy applied to questions Augustine and Aquinas posed.

Sources

1. Zagzebski, L. (2017). "Foreknowledge and Free Will." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/free-will-foreknowledge/
2. Flint, T. P. (2019). "Divine Providence." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/providence-divine/
3. Cunnington, T. (2020). "Predestination." Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/predest/
4. Mendelson, M. (2019). "Saint Augustine." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/
5. McInerny, R. & O'Callaghan, J. (2018). "Saint Thomas Aquinas." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aquinas/

Related Topics

• The philosophical core of the problem is treated in the discussions of what free will is and what determinism is.
• The theological problem of predestination is distinct from the scientific problem of determinism; see is everything predetermined.
• Augustine's defense of freedom is presented in the quote augustine-on-free-will.
• The ethics of divine command and desert connects this debate to the philosophy of religion.
• The free will topic gathers the full range of questions about freedom and responsibility.