Jud Evans
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CHRISTIAN DETERMINISM

AN ESSAY

Jud Evans December 2008 

INTRODUCTION

There are some works of philosophy or theology, that may be researched, written (and sometimes read) as an austere pursuit of the pleasure of participating as the thought burgeons and develops in this direction and that. Such has been my experience during the research and the writing of this paper.

*  *  *  *  *

The essay comprises of five parts.

1

FREE WILL AND DETERMINISM – DEFINITION

2

FATALISM, PREDICTION AND  DETERMINISM

3

GOD'S  FOREKNOWLEDGE AND   FREE WILL

4

SOME MAINSTREAM CHRISTIAN ATTITUDES

5

A   CONCLUSION WITH  A  PERSONAL  VIEW

*  *  *  *  *

FREE WILL & DETERMINISM – AN INTRODUCTORY OVERVIEW

Some Definitions of a Religious Understanding of Determinism:

Determinists are divided between the so-called hard determinists, who hold that free will is incompatible with  determinism, and compatibilists, also known as soft determinists who hold that determinism is compatible with free will.   People who hold that determinism is false are called libertarians. 

PART TWO

FATALISM, PREDICTION AND DETERMINISM

Many people wonder if there is a difference between determinism, fatalism and prediction (prognostication.)  One can easily differentiate the idea of fatalism from determinism by considering on the one hand:

The references regarding foreknowledge and providence have antecedents in the written biblical scripture, even though they are sometimes provided in the slightly ambiguous or metaphorical  forms of language characteristic of spiritual writings,  which flows from the difficulties of expression in such matters.

 The lot is cast into the lap; but the whole disposing thereof is of the LORD. (Proverbs. 16:33)

For many religious people, biblical quotations such as the above, when taken literally, provide sufficient evidence to confirm that there are spiritually engendered forces at play.  To such folk even the most trivial experiential outcomes of our daily lives are engendered by God and are not the results of deterministic natural laws alone, or indeed simple chance. 

Hence events at the gaming table are seen to be fated to happen, because it is seen to be in accordance with the will, mysterious providential schemata or preordained plans of Almighty God. 

Fatalism then is a perception of God as dispensing his Holy Will by (metaphorically speaking) writing a script or an existential scenario for all his children, by setting in train a planned program of inevitable mechanistic concatenation. By that I mean the deity not simply winding-up and setting in motion the universal clock in the manner of a primum mobile,  and letting it slowly unwind, ungoverned and unmonitored, in a random indeterministic manner – but by coiling the springs of countless ‘tailor-made’ individually programmed clocks for every life-form and inanimate entity in the cosmos.

NATURAL  CAUSALITY  OR  DETERMINISTIC   LAW

    Conversely, there are many who imagine the world being influenced by materialistic, deterministic concatenational laws, without anything at all being fated or destined to come about as a result of  God’s design or any other spiritual intervention or influence. 

 Upon reflection, it seems fairly obvious that the sundry agnostics and atheists of history, or the present-day promoters of the current materialistic or non-deistic explanations which threaten the religious institutions  may be judged guilty of simply appropriating  or plagiarising ontological aspects of the religious version  (for it was the religious model which all of the disparate societies of mankind first adopted) and converting it for the benefit of their own worldly-minded agenda, by overtly substituting ‘God’ with a de-spiritualised ‘Nature’ in the manner of Richard Dawkins, and  passing it off as their own idea, or replacing it covertly by supervening ‘Nature’ upon ‘God’ in the surreptitious manner of  the ingenious Spinoza?

FATALISTICALLY ENGENDERED SPIRITUAL FORCES

There is another ‘in-house’ threat to monotheistic theology, which warns of a regression to fatalism.  It concerns a possible conflict between God’s divine providence and his equally infallible sacred foreknowledge. It can be summed up as a conflict between certain interpretations of the Christian perception of God's intellect and various ideas concerning the nature of God’s will.  The problem can be highlighted up in this manner:

 But that is not all, for free will is also threatened by Divine Providence, for if all events are controlled by God’s providential and paternalistic benign will, then the Almighty decides how everything turns out best for us in His given circumstances, so once again we lack the freedom to act in the way we wish and so once again –  we are not free.  But it is not only to us humans that God’s Divine providential concern extends. God’s stewardship of the elements of his creation is hyper-extensional and encompasses his earthly instaurations beyond the human family.  As  the biblical hermenuetician Dr. Paul Marston points out in his: ‘Understanding Biblical Creation Passages:’

‘When Job was puzzled at the issue of apparently unwarranted suffering, part of God's response was to ask:

But if there is a causal chain - who or what set this series of linked events in train?  Was it an all-knowing God’s beneficent will, or Richard Dawkins’ scientistic version of an creatio ex nihlio genetical jack-in-the box of unlikely lucky chances, which sprang forth Pandora-like and gave birth to his robotic humans or ‘survival machines,’ which have been ‘blindly programmed’ in the absence of any cosmic programmer blind or sighted?  [2] (Dawkins 1989)

PROGNOSTICATION AND DETERMINISM

      It is not difficult to differentiate prognostication from determinism. There is a well-known description of cosmic determinism by the French philosopher and mathematician Count Pierre-Simon Laplace. The ‘intelligence’ that the atheist Laplace cites in the passage below, might well be God, for the count’s description of a cosmic creativeness fits him perfectly, which was surely not the Frenchman’s intention, but for some the two notions of ‘a Creative  Intelligence’ and  ‘a Creative God’ are easy both  to confuse, conflate as well as to separate.

It appears then that counterfactual demons prove a very popular transcendental tool for French philosophers, for just as Descartes introduced his 'malicious demon,' the potentially evil beguiler of the 'Meditations on First Philosophy,' whose conjectural existence as a genius malignus, was a necessary requirement of his rigorous exercise to satisfy himself that he really existed, so too is Laplace credited with the above famous quotation which is often referred to as: 'Laplace's Demon.'

And now in part three I turn to  a consideration of whether human behaviour is the result of heavenly foreordination, or whether we are free to act as we wish?

The thesis of Fatalism is that the necessity of human behaviour emerges as the result of heavenly foreordination and therefore is unfree action. The form of theological teaching that insists that our fate is determined in advance is usually associated with Calvin, for whom God has foreordained every event throughout time without end. Strangely mirroring the atheist Laplace’s identification of a non-specific super-human ‘intelligence,’ theological fatalism holds that God’s inerrant awareness of every human act and every event before it happens renders the act necessary and our experiential biography is therefore unfree. Many, if not all Christians would insist that indeed there is a being who infallibly knows everything that will happen in the future – and that being is God. And yes, as Laplace rightly claimed – logically no human act is free if there is a being who is infallibly aware in advance of everything that will happen in the future, for no human being has any control over the future. Christians would say that the Frenchman’s fault lay not in his dianoetic reasoning, but in his dismissal of God as the divine volition and his interpolation of an unspecified anonymous noesis in his place.

The fatalist argument creates a theological dilemma, for many historical and modern religious leaders have perceived it vital to assert on the one hand that mankind has the free will to accept or reject the love that God offers (together with the responsibilities that acceptance entails, or the obligations that rejection obviates) and the fact that God infallibly knows the entire future. Thus the theological anomaly appears to suggest that human free will and God’s infallibly are incompatible, for to accept free will is to deny God’s infallibilty.

                                               RELIGIOUS COMPATIBILISTS

Christians who maintain it possible to reconcile both conflicting beliefs are labelled ‘religious compatibilists’ in the sense of their personal satisfactory reconciliation of God’s infallible foreknowledge and human free will. These religious thinkers who wish to prescind and accept both free will and infallible foreknowledge must either discover a false assumption in the theological juxtaposition of free will and infallible foreknowledge or demonstrate the hermeneutical error of those who wrongly interpret the scriptures and propose such a counter-intuitive duality. Religious incompatibilists proclaim the mutual exclusiveness of foreknowledge and human free will and deny both the characterisation of infallible foreknowledge and free will as signified in the argument. Their method of rapprochement is to question the propositional manner or language in which the problem is couched

Crick, Marston and Forster

Sometimes people say or write things that are so apodeictically obvious that one wonders what all the academic and Christian determinist disputation is all about in the first place? Such an astute observation can be found in the book by polymaths Marston and Forster. A review of ‘Reason, Science and Faith’ (2001) by Dr. Rodney Holder
(Oxford D. Phil in Astrophysics) describes it as one in which the authors:

‘Robustly expose the intellectual and moral poverty of the scientistic atheism,’ [4] (Holder 2001)

The authors of ‘Reason, Science and Faith, who like many other scientists and highly qualified academics both historical and contemporary are practising Christians, were anxious both to dispel some hermeneutical misunderstandings to be found in the bible and establish the actuality of libertarian free will and to  make it plain that human beings are responsible to make moral choices.’

They were able to make this point regarding a reference to something written by the famous biologist Frances Crick. Although the great biologist was a highly educated man having a B. Sc. in physics and another in biology, he was, like many, at the same time under the erroneous impression that all Christians believe in an immortal soul. For him the very idea of a non-material soul that could enter a body and then persist after death is just that - an imagined idea. In fact Crick, referred to himself in his autobiography ‘What Mad Pursuit’ as:

                      ‘A sceptic and an agnostic with strong inclination towards atheism'

                       [5] (Crick. 1990 p. 146)

In order to make the points both that the Bible does not imply that man has an immortal soul and that humankind is quite capable of making moral choices, the authors quote John Foster - a dualist interactionist of some renown who points out that:

Crick tempered his strong beliefs later on in life, when he stated:

                                                              PART FOUR

                                  SOME MAINSTREAM CHRISTIAN ATTITUDES

Initially I sketched in my impressions of Christian attitudes to determinism with very light brushstrokes at that early stage, the ostensibly simple traditionalist definition of the aspect of Christian theology that deals with salvation as the effect of a divine agency as introduced out the outset of this paper is starting to look a little oversimplified now we have come thus far. Now is the time to widen the frame of the question by examining and appraising what particular deterministic - fatalistic differences of interpretation may obtain between the various Christian groupings.

To generalise, the apparent straightforward view of Christianity in fact conceals a wide spectrum of Christian opinion that extends from an extreme liberalism to an extreme monergism, within which three broadly different interpretive systems can be distinguished. The churches or denominations appear to be divided mainly by the contradictions implied in holding a totally monergistic or hard deterministic view of God's relationship with mankind on the one hand, as opposed to the softer theological implications of a synergistic or compatibilistic stance on the other, with yet another, almost totally liberalistic grouping who regard action of any kind, including moral choices, as lying purely within the scope of all individual members of mankind. This of course is a gross generalisation, and there are many gradations and different shades of opinion nestled within the interstices of that belief-spectrum. The early traditional Christian theological attitude to free will and determinism has been (in spite of some minor early differences of opinion) quite straightforward. Personal, public and natural events in the world have been pre-ordained by the will of Almighty God as proclaimed by the good news embodied in the eschatology of the biblical accounts of the word of Jesus.

Other than that, it is only through leading lives of moral excellence, or through unusual acts of personal sacrifice or faith can the laws of nature and the inevitable consequence of antecedent sufficient causes and the concatenational events of nature be circumvented, changed or avoided via the divine grace of God that (with apologies to Shakespeare) the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or the inexorable unfolding of concatenational consequences can ever be modified or mollified.

Certain serious theological disadvantages accompany this assignment of the responsibility for all that happens as being derived from or associated with the divine power. It creates the notion of blame and responsibility and with it the serious problem of explaining away or providing apologist reasons, causes or justifications of the evil that seems to be ubiquitous in the world.

Because of that much of early Christian theology is concerned with the defence of Christian doctrines. It is very instructive and interesting to study the manner in which some early Christian thinkers such as Saint Augustine and others responded so brilliantly to the challenge of explaining how a being who controls even the smallest detail of every event in the cosmos - a supreme being whom theology holds out to be a manifestation of the utmost power, perfection and loving goodness, can countenance even a hint of evil in the world.

                                                                Monergism

St. Augustine of Hippo placed great store in the power and grace of God in the salvation of souls and ushered in the idea of monergism to Christianity. Monergism is the belief that human agency or the state of being in action or exerting unique power is entirely passive and it is God's agency which is all-determining - all-pervasive YET WITHOUT DESTROYING HUMAN FREEDOM OF THOUGHT AND ACTION. 'Monergism’ (as opposed to ‘synergism’) is the doctrine that the Holy Spirit alone can act to bring about the religious conversion of people. Monergism, in its simplest form states that salvation is all the work of God. It is usually linked with Calvinism and its belief in irresistible grace, as opposed to synergism, which constitutes its main differences with Arminianism and Roman Catholicism. [8] (wikipedia)

Held in Orange, France in 529. The Second Council of Orange dealt more directly with ongoing theological issues surrounding the conflict between Augustine, Bishop of Hippo in North Africa (354-430) and Pelagius, a British monk (c. 354 - c. 420/440) who challenged some of the traditional views of the Church. This is the relevant canon 23 that was agreed to by the council:

It can be seen in the canon 23 fragment below, that whilst free will in man was not denied, it cleverly characterises human volition as that exercise of human will which displeases God. The didactic import is clear – do as God wills – not as you will.

                                                                Calvinism

The more extreme version of Christian theological determinism is best characterised by the doctrine of John Calvin (1509-1564.) Calvin was a French Protestant disputant who advocated reform in the sixteenth century. Calvinism holds that the inviolable sovereignty of God is paramount. God's omnipotence is total and he has omniscient perception of everything that has and will happen in the cosmos.

Pardon and salvation are forms of limited atonement accomplishable by and to God's favoured few, and because not everyone is a Christian, God must  have selected only some for salvation. The nature of the death of his son our Jesus Christ was also only for those few elect, and not the many. This seems rather out of keeping with God's stated reason for the crucifixion, for one of the most quoted verses from the Bible informs us that Jesus died for all humanity:

One is entitled to wonder here if the ‘wicked hands’ can be admonished for demonstrably carrying out God’s will? Thankfully the Christian theologian Millard Erickson comes to our aid and makes a good observation in this respect, which for me supplies a satisfactory explanation:

                                                              Synergism

Synergism means that salvation is a cooperative activity. Salvation is not a God-only process, but a God-and process. This working together is termed Synergism. Such Synergism was a religious philosophy with humanistic overtones even in Old Testament times, and it has been in evidence in every generation. It is man's demand not to be considered impotent, Man admits his sickness, but he is unwilling to admit his death.

Surely this in itself confirms that man is credited with the decision-making ability to opt for performing the actions requisite for initiating that which is required to achieve salvation, which in itself is a tacit acknowledgement of the existence of free will in mankind?

                                                            Methodism

First some biblical quotations suggestive of free will.

'They have built the high places... to burn their sons and daughters in the fire - something I did not command nor did it enter my mind' (Jeremiah 7:31)

With regard the Calvinistic interpretation that God has only chosen some to be saved Peter writes:

'The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance'

(2. Peter 3:9 and see Ezekiel 33:11/1 Timothy 2:3-4)

‘Furthermore, it is also taught that God gives us freedom to make a real choice to follow God., (Is. 55:1/Matthew 11:28)

Although Arminians retain the notion that we are elected to salvation, they do so on the basis that God has merely chosen those God already knows will accept salvation (Romans 8:29). To some this point may be more a technicality in order to distinguish Arminianism from Calvinism rather than anything else.

Theologically, John Wesley the founder of Methodism was essentially a follower of Jacobus Arminius the Dutch theologian and founder of Arminianism, which opposed the absolute predestinarianism of Calvin and was influential throughout Europe. In 1744 the first Annual Methodist Conference was held and the Articles of Religion were drawn up. They were based to a considerable extent upon the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, but great emphasis was laid upon repentance, faith, sanctification, and the privilege of full, free salvation for everyone. By 1995 there were about 388,000 Methodists in Great Britain. There are over 26 million Methodists worldwide.

A recent (2000) document issued by the General Conference of the American United Methodist Church ‘on new developments in genetic science,’ included a statement in Section III. A of the conference report which appears to leave the deterministic door slightly ajar with regard to a possible revaluation or recognition of certain genetic determinations as the following brief paragraph makes clear:

After reiterating that creation has its origin, existence, value, and destiny in God the document defines human beings as 'stewards of creation' with all the logical implications for free will and decision-making that such a custodianship entails and further explains:

'While human beings share with other species the limitations of finite creatures who owe their existence to God, their special creation 'in the image of God' gives them the freedom and authority to exercise stewardship responsibly. [15] (Ibid.)

For the pragmatic Methodists at least there is no evangelical time wasted agonising over freedom of choice. The obviousness of free will remains unhindered by obfuscation and hermeneutical misunderstanding.

For Methodists at least the way is clear:

‘Free will exists, so let us exercise that free will by getting on with the business of telling others of the Good News and spreading Christ’s message.'

CONCLUSION

So after this fairly comprehensive review of the differing attitudes of Christianity towards determinism – where do I stand personally? Theology aside I reject the middle of the road compatibilist stance as ontologically  too vague.  Even though I do not submit to the belief that I able to change my destiny, I confess to being attracted in some ways to the fatalist approach, but like most people I am happy  to put 'reality' on the back burner and  to pretend to myself that  the 'decisions' I make are my own..

I sometimes ask myself: 'Well, what is wrong with fatalism anyway?'

Who is right indeed?

Marston  and  Forster help us again by formulating  the important questions:

 One thing is certain - fatalism delivers us from uncertainty, for there is a comforting assurance in putting one’s trust in God, which anyone who  has visited a mosque in the east, or a clap-board country church in the depths of the Russian countryside as I have done, would readily appreciate just by observing the faces and deportment of the faithful.

The ability for human predictability is severely limited by the deterministically engendered behaviour of other inevitable consequences of antecedent sufficient causes and their variables. We can however conceive of a vaguely reliable extension ( a weak or strong possibility) of the eventive concatenational chain continuing more or less predictably (into the so-called *future*) as one event supplants another, particularly if such a *prediction* is based upon a past record of a regularity of events.

So, though it is possible to make informed guesses as to the immediate future, one can never be certain in the face of so many (equally determined) polynomial existential functions that are the sum or nexus of a large number of converging event-variables.

Perhaps it can be explained because I am now an old man, and in a like manner to Frances Crick with his burgeoning agnosticism as he grew older, my attitudes are mellowing with time too? I no longer believe in God in the way that I did as a young child, nor that some supernatural being foreordains by divine will or heavenly decree that such things happen in the order they do. My determinism is now of the atheistic kind and conceives of 'nature' as an uncaring, material imperative of change predicated upon the absence of any agential connection of inclusion or containment. Human decision-making is merely a feature of our imagination.  All our thoughts and these words I write  are entirely deterministic as many scientists and others claim.

‘Reason, Science and Faith’  poses the vital questions in this manner:

‘Is a completely deterministic view of the brain either plausible or compatible with Christian belief?’  

                                                 Eccles states strongly:

“If physical determinism is true, then that is the end of all discussion or argument; everything is finished. There is no philosophy. All human persons are caught up in this inexorable web of circumstances and cannot break out of it. Everything we think we are doing is an illusion...”

 [17] (Eccles. 1980 p. 546)

‘MacKay, in contrast, argues that it would be unproblematic for the Christian if it turned out that’:

“...

knowledge of our brain mechanisms and the forces acting on and in them were sufficient to allow our actions to be predicted  (secretly) by a detached observer.”

 [18] (MacKay 1980 p. 69)

 Christians regard it as a given that God exerts a divinely conferred dominion over nature. To them it seems logical that a necessary assumption of God’s administrative and volitionary ascendancy is that free will must exist for humans. They cannot see the point for God to have 'wound up the mechanism of the cosmos' and then to have absconded and left it to run without further stewardship. For the believer God is perfect and is the solitary determinator of all creation. For the Christian, if God controls the catenulate unspooling of time and only lets us imagine that we have a modicum of free will as frame by frame our life is projected upon the screen of our experience – then they would not be in the least upset by that. For them God is the cosmic projectionist, and they are but a willing member of the captive audience. They are content to enjoy the production in which they are both an active participant and a passive spectator. They say that a God of that awe-inspiring, unimaginable stature and magnitude is bound to move in ways which seem to us mysterious. Their God is a fair, loving, compassionate father whose mercy extends comprehensively to all his flock – not pre-selected individuals.

Finally I believe in a situation of extreme determinism (or forthright fatalism) resulting from acceptance of the doctrine that everything that happens is predetermined and inevitable.   Whilst Christian determinists believe that in addition to the essential work of the evangelical church,  that God has created us with an inherent awareness of the efficacy of behaving morally, which is experientially confirmed and reinforced  in practice in our relationship with society I believe in a humanist doctrine of treating others as I would hope that they treated me.  My doctrine does not include the Christian one on 'turning the other cheek' - if somebody insults me the I insult them back in more than equal measure. Thus my outlook in the last degree does not conflict so much with the ethics of the religious. 

                                               Jesus. Matthew 7:12, Luke 6:31, Luke 10:27