William Lane Craig
RESPONSE TO GREGORY A. BOYD
Gregory Boyd’s opening reflections on criteria for an adequate theory of providence afford me the opportunity to state what I understand to be the constraints or guidelines for theological construction. The problem with Boyd’s christocentric criteria is not just that what one sees in Jesus as determinative tends to be rather subjective but, more fundamentally, that Boyd’s criteria state merely necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for an adequate doctrine of providence. Imagine being told that to become the Wimbledon champion, a player must meet the following criteria: (1) he must be ambulatory, (2) he must understand the rules of tennis, (3) he must be able to hit the ball over the net, and (4) he must not be blind. All those properties are, indeed, necessary, but they are obviously far from sufficient to make a Wimbledon champion! Similarly, Boyd’s criteria are not sufficient for an adequate theory of divine providence.
In general, there are two criteria that I think should guide the task of theological construction: (1) consistency with Scripture and (2) consistency with perfect being theology. The first criterion requires that we consult the whole of Scripture’s teaching concerning the subject at hand and not just christologically relevant passages. The second criterion draws on St. Anselm’s insight that God is by definition the greatest conceivable being, so that scriptural teaching should be extrapolated to the highest degree of perfection possibly attributable to God. In particular, God’s attributes, such as omnipotence, omniscience, and goodness, should be understood in the greatest terms possible.
These two criteria will require the open theist to show that his denial of divine foreknowledge of future contingents is (1) consistent with scriptural teaching about divine foreknowledge and prophecy and (2) consistent with divine omniscience, which entails that God has knowledge of all truths, including any truths about future contingents. Molinism meets not only Boyd’s four criteria but also these additional two criteria.
There is much to appreciate in Boyd’s essay, particularly his emphasis on the way God glorifies himself by sharing his eternal, other-oriented, triune love with us. This necessitates libertarian freedom on the part of humans. But I find Boyd’s analysis of libertarian freedom as involving the power of alternative possibilities to be defective. His example of a person with a microchip in his brain that was implanted by a manipulative scientist illustrates the point. Suppose the scientist is an Obama supporter who has decided to ensure that the person votes for Obama in the next election. He monitors his subject’s brain activity as he goes into the polling booth; he is ready to press the button to activate the microchip, but to his delight, the person votes for Obama all on his own, so that the scientist never in fact activates the chip. It seems clear that the person involved freely voted for Obama, even though it was not possible for him to do otherwise. This scenario suggests that what is essential to libertarian freedom is not the possibility of choosing otherwise but rather the absence of causal constraints outside oneself that determine how one chooses. As Boyd puts it, libertarian freedom requires that we have genuine “say-so” about our choices: that they be “up to us.”
This understanding of libertarian freedom has the advantage that it enables us to ascribe libertarian freedom to God himself and to Christ in resisting temptation, which Boyd cannot. Boyd’s analysis requires him to say that God’s love is not freely given and therefore to make an arbitrary exception to the claim that true love requires libertarian freedom. It also forces him to the perverse conclusion that the perfection of libertarian free will in heaven is compatibilistic free will. By contrast, if libertarian freedom amounts to the ability to make externally undetermined choices, then perfect love does not cast out freedom.
A second problem in Boyd’s essay is his uncritically equating control with causal determinism. We see the conflation of these notions in his statement that
God’s decision to create a cosmos populated with free agents was also a decision to create and govern a world he could not unilaterally control … What it means for God to give agents some degree of morally responsible say-so over what comes to pass is that God’s say-so will not unilaterally determine all that comes to pass.
Notice how unilateral control is here equated with unilateral determinism. Ironically, Boyd hereby reveals that he is still a bedfellow with Reformed theologians like Helseth, who makes this equation the centerpiece of his essay. It is no wonder, then, that Boyd finds himself “unable to ascribe coherent meaning” to the statement of the Westminster Confession that:
God from all eternity did by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass; yet so as thereby neither is God the author of sin; nor is violence offered to the will of creatures, nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established.
This is precisely what the Molinist believes, and it is a tragedy that in rejecting middle knowledge, Reformed divines have cut themselves off from the most perspicuous explanation of the coherence of this wonderful confession.
Boyd asks whether we can “conceive of any form of justice” that would exonerate the controlling person from responsibility for the controlled subject’s actions. Yes, indeed—our own American system of justice! When the FBI conducts a sting operation to catch a child pornographer or a drug dealer, agents will arrange to put the suspected criminal in circumstances in which they expect that he will freely sell them the pornography or drugs, and when he does so, the agents arrest him. The criminal, of course, will claim entrapment, but if the FBI has done its job carefully, the judge will rule that the pornographer or drug dealer sold the contraband freely and was not compelled to do so and therefore is guilty of the crime. The illustration reinforces what we saw before: that freedom is a matter of the absence of external causal constraints determining one’s action. Given middle knowledge, God has no need to resort to causal determinism in order meticulously to control a world of free agents.
Boyd’s most serious misunderstandings, however, emerge when he turns to a discussion of the nature of time and of God’s foreknowledge of future contingents. Exposing these errors requires an almost line-by-line exegesis. Consider first the claim:
If an agent possesses free will to choose between alternate possibilities, then what is real, prior to the agent’s choice, are the alternate possibilities. Hence, insofar as agents have been given genuine say-so freely to resolve possibilities into actualities and thereby effect what comes to pass, the open view holds that the future is comprised of alternate ontological possibilities.
Here two claims are being run together. The first is the affirmation of what philosophers call a “tensed” theory of time. According to this theory, the future is not on an ontological par with the past and the present. Whereas things in the past and the present have been actualized, the future is pure potentiality. This is because temporal becoming is an objective feature of reality. Future events are not somehow “waiting” up ahead for us; rather things come into being in the present. The second claim is causal indeterminism. Given libertarian freedom, the course of events later than any time t is not determined by the causes operative up until t. A free choice at t will result in different events after t depending on what is chosen.
Now, these two claims are distinct. One could embrace a tensed theory of time and be a causal determinist (after all, temporal becoming was real before free agents arrived on the scene). One could hold to causal indeterminism and adopt a tenseless theory of time, according to which future events do exist (many physicists who accept quantum indeterminism would adopt such a view). To avoid confusion, we must keep the claim of a tensed theory of time and the claim of causal indeterminism distinct, even if we accept both claims (as I do).
The sort of confusion I have in mind is evident in Boyd’s next sentence:
In contrast to the classical view that assumed the future could be exhaustively described by propositions asserting what will or will not come to pass, the open view holds that, insofar as agents face ontological possibilities, the future must be described by propositions asserting what might and might not come to pass.
This sentence creates a false opposition. Classical theists typically embraced a tensed theory of time and causal indeterminism, so that they agreed that agents face ontological possibilities and that there are true propositions about what they might or might not do in a causal sense. 378But they also affirmed that future-tense statements about what will or will not happen are bivalent, that is to say, either true or false; for example, “Tomorrow Claudius will freely go to the Senate.” There is no contradiction whatever in making true, future-tense statements about the occurrence of causally indeterminate events. Hence, we may agree with Boyd that God knows the future as partly comprised of ontological possibilities and, hence, knows the truth-values of “might” as well as “will” propositions.
We can therefore only regard as a serious misrepresentation Boyd’s assertion that the God of classical theism knows the future as exhaustively described by “will” propositions. Classical theists who hold to libertarian freedom recognize that even though it may be true that someone will freely choose x, still, until the event actually happens, the possibility remains open that he might not choose x.
The reason that open theists are accused of denying divine omniscience is because they deny that God knows future contingent truths, such as truths about what agents will freely do. Boyd would avoid this unorthodox conclusion by denying that there are any future contingent truths. He asks, “Why must there be a determinate fact of the matter about which causally possible future is ‘the’ actual future?” Two reasons, I think. First, Scripture gives examples of such truths, for instance, Jesus’ prediction that Peter would deny him three times before the cock crowed. Boyd’s attempt to explain this incident away as an instance of character determinism is desperate. Second, the logical principle of bivalence requires that any statement be either true or false. Attempts to deny this principle lead logically to highly implausible results. 379
In defense of his view, Boyd first puts forward an argument by Alan Rhoda, which asserts, in effect, that
1. Necessarily, if the principle of bivalence is valid for future contingent statements, then agent A chooses this and not that.
The premise is false; what is necessarily implied by the principle of bivalence is that agent A chooses this or that. The principle obviously does not imply which choice agent A makes.
Boyd’s second argument, that we all live as though the future were partly open, need not detain us, for causal indeterminism does not imply that future-tense statements are not bivalent.
Boyd’s third argument is the most confused of all. Boyd proposes a reform of the English language according to which the contradictory of “x will occur” is “x might not occur,” and the contradictory of “x will not occur” is “x might occur.” The statements “x will occur” and “x will not occur” are on this view contraries, not contradictories. I hazard to say that no English grammar will support Boyd’s understanding of these expressions. He is speaking his own idiolect here. The problem with this is that it mixes modal locutions (“might” statements) with nonmodal locutions (“will” statements). In normal English, the statement that something will occur, but might not occur, is perfectly coherent. That is just to affirm that it will occur contingently. Boyd must be assuming that “will” statements are actually disguised modal statements to the effect that something “must” occur and so can be set in opposition to “might” statements. But that is simply not normal English usage.
The point is that insofar as “will” has its normal English meaning of expressing simply the future tense of a verb, on Boyd’s view the principle of bivalence must fail for future contingent statements, on pain of denying divine omniscience, resulting in the logical dislocations entailed by such a denial. All this, moreover, is unnecessary, since one can embrace a tensed theory of time and causal indeterminism without sacrificing the bivalence of future contingent statements.
What, then, of Boyd’s view of providence? The Molinist, like Boyd, will affirm that God knows all the possible story lines and all the possible endings. But the Molinist adds that God knows as well which story line you will freely choose. In the Molinist view, as in open theism, God does outsmart his opponents without denying to them their rightful “say-so.” One curious feature of Boyd’s view is that the God of open theism knows the truth of counterfactuals of divine freedom concerning what he would do in any circumstances, but not counterfactuals of creaturely freedom. Boyd insists that God knows each and every story line as if it were a certainty. But he does not take God’s freedom to be thereby obviated. If knowing what he would freely do in any set of circumstances is consistent with God’s freedom, it is hard to see why his knowing what we would freely do in any circumstances is inconsistent with our freedom.
Which view better handles the problem of evil? Molinism does, for God permits horrible evils only in view of morally sufficient reasons, whereas the God of open theism, once he sees disaster looming on the horizon (Hitler’s coming to power, for example), does not interfere to prevent terrible evils that anyone could have seen coming. Any reason he might have for not intervening can be adopted with equal justification by the Molinist.
How might the Molinist handle the fate of the lost? He might maintain that worlds involving universal salvation were not feasible for God or had other overriding disadvantages (like having only a handful of people in them) that made them less desirable.380 God’s trying to reach persons who he knows will freely reject his grace is a measure of how gracious God is. To extend mercy even to those who he knew would spurn it evinces extraordinary benevolence on God’s part.
Molinism holds that it remains possible that these persons might comply, as does open theism. Moreover, given his middle knowledge, God can providentially order the world so that everyone who would freely respond to the gospel if he heard it is born at a time and place in history where he will hear it. By contrast in the open theist view, God allows millions of people to languish in spiritual darkness without making any serious effort to bring the gospel to them, with the (presumable) result that many are doomed to hell due to the accidents of history and geography.
Boyd rightly rejects the determinism of our Reformed brethren. But he needs to realize that Molinism provides a sound alternative that allows him to affirm libertarian freedom and a tensed view of time without lapsing into the unjustified excesses of open theism.