Predestination and Free Will: A Thought Experiment

That vexing perennial, Predestination and Free Will, constitutes perhaps one of the biggest and most unanswerable questions of the Christian faith.  Part of the complexity is not merely just the topic at hand, but how it fits into a myriad of other doctrines, such as election, and above all (and most neglected of all, I think) how our belief in the Triune God can affect attempts at resolution of the question.


I offer no extended analysis here (though I would like to in the future).  Rather what I want to do is start a series of reflections or thought experiments.  I want to do this because aside from a few lights, such as Karl Barth's christocentric concept of election, there have been precious few attempts at innovation in regards to the question.  I must agree with LeRon Shults in his fascinating book Reforming the Doctrine of God that despite the myriad number of positions (Calvinism, Arminianism, Pelagianism, Molinism, Open Theism, Panentheisms of many sorts, etc...) these essentially constitute positions which can be organized along a spectrum of common presuppositions.  In essence, argues Shults, much of the stalemates and difficulties come from all the players not questioning the playing field itself.


Now part of the solution, I believe, lay along directions proposed by Michael Hanby (Augustine and Modernity) and David Bentley Hart (in his essay "On the Infinite Innocence of God") that a large amount of headway lays within a creative ressourcement or retrieval of certain Patristic and Medieval ideas that have been lost or modulated into unhelpful channels of reflection.  But that will be for a later post on how the Trinity, and perhaps a Trinitarian ontology of creation, can suggest a way to look at the problem which some may find helpful.  For now, however, I want to try a different thought experiment which I proposed several years ago but want to try and start up again.  The philosopher Husserl, in an attempt to understand human perception, proposed several of what he called "bracketings" or "reductions."  Which is to say in order to understand the problem, certain things had to be momentarily pushed aside as distractions in order that through this "bracketing out" truth could appear.  I want to propose in this post a first such reduction necessary, I believe, for approaching the problem of Predestination and Free will which I will, for convenience, label "The Reference-Shift Dilemma."


While that title sounds fancy, for those who have ever though about predestination, or fate, or even the future, will recognize its characteristics.  What I mean by "shift of reference" is that the discussion attempts to proceed by, in one instance, viewing ontology from God's point of view (e.g. "If God foreknows/predestines that you are going to eat a sandwich tomorrow...") and simultaneously viewing from mans point of view ("...how are you free to choose eating said sandwich if God has already predetermined it..."). This attempt at a duality of viewpoints seems completely natural, because of course it is precisely the relationship between God and man which we are attempting to speak about, so why not use two reference points in this manner?

But I think the way that this duality of reference points is simultaneously used unfortunately glosses over, and predetermines (pun intended) the limits of the discussion. While there is a whole array of questions that need to be addressed in this complex issue, I am putting them aside (bracketing them out) for the moment to address what this change of reference does, and why we perhaps need to approach it differently.

To begin, in the example of me being predestined tomorrow to eat a sandwich, the simultaneity of viewpoints has made the future (me eating a sandwich) known to me (even if this is only a hypothetical example), which, obviously, I do not know otherwise. In other words I dont know if Im going to eat a sandwich tomorrow, even if that is indeed what God has predestined me to do. But this indeterminacy of my knowledge of the future is part of my current intuition that I am making an open ended choice to choose to eat or not eat a sandwich tomorrow. On occasion of course there may be instances where me eating a sandwich tomorrow is foreknown by me (because, e.g. Im out of money and groceries except sandwich stuff) but in general the indeterminacy of our knowledge of the future is of vital importance to, at the very least, anintuition that free choice is possible.  To use a fancy term: the phenomenological quality of the future, which is to say how the future appears to me, is one of contingency and openness.  I would like to be bold here and remark that given our relatively small windows of knowledge and reasoning via probability, even if we are in fact predetermined, this phenomenological quality of the future appearing to us, or our relation to the future, is the same as it is if we are not predestined and the future is indeed open. Which is to say: predestined or not predestined, our relationship to the world appears to be the same.  It occurs to us in our finitude and situatedness in the world.


Yet when the duality of reference points is brought into the discussion, the future is implicitly presented as now known for the sake of laying out an illustration of the problem of free will and determinism. This means that I become reflectively aware of my own situation as being set out apart from my own ability (e.g. now I know, from God's view, that he has predetermined I am going to eat a sandwich).

But this is an unfair way to frame the question, in my mind. God, being infinite, is related ontologically to events differently than I am as a finite, particular being. God's "viewpoint," is of a whole, presented in totality (in this I am primarily following Pannenberg's concept of eternity, which is an elaboration of Augustine). God's ontological relationship is to this whole as a complete entity In-Himself (either in the more traditional formulations of aseity as of David Bentley Hart, or of Jenson's eschatologically complete God). God, in other words, provides His own ontological possibility for Himself, either in essence or in the more left-wing Barthian approaches as an act of decision and election. The point being that God, as infinite, relates Himself to the entirety of history as the Eternal God He is. 


You and I, however, as finite, and particular beings, are ontologically constituted through time in the sense of actual evolution and alteration (rather than God's "becoming," in Jungel's sense of the term). We are constituted as historical situated individuals whose ontological horizon, as it were, is set off and constituted through various serial displays of relationships bound to the march of time and the particular local of our finite selves. What happens when the question is posed in terms of the duality of reference, then, is that our historical particularity and particular horizon of knowledge is suspended as we attempt to view ourselves from God's universality.  This is not merely an epistemological suspension, but to borrow the language of Martin Heidegger, the nature of our being itself has been forgotten because our "being" is not isolable from our "being-there" (dasein). 


To put it plainly: this scenario (or whatever variation of it) which is used to clarify the dilemma of predestination and free will in order to perhaps better understand and so perhaps solve or at least soften it, is itself what generates the apparent problem of freedom in the face of determinacy.


The hypothetical scenario of me being predestined to eat a sandwich, as I said before, in order to become a heuristic via which we might approach the problem of predestination and free will must in its own constitution as a question go beyond whatever natural ability I have to be related to the otherwise not-yet of the future in order to present this future as in some sense controlled by God. I now know, in other words, that I am going to eat a sandwich tomorrow, and the conundrum then becomes how am I free in light of this apparently fixed event? In other words the duality of reference suspends my immediate contextual reference to the world via my own situation and location, and now in this conjecture I am related to myself and know myself only as mediated via the "viewpoint," of God. I see myself only as the person whom God has predestined to do such-and-such, and can only reflectively ask about myself and my own freedom mediated through this view of myself through Eternity's relatedness to time.


Through this, obviously, the problem arises as to how I am free in this scenario?  Could I have chosen otherwise?  
In this heuristic then, it appears that me eating a sandwich tomorrow is inevitable, even though as I said before from my own viewpoint (and indeed in my own mode of existence) I have no idea whats going on tomorrow. The problem then becomes a spectrum against which various solutions are posited in something of a zero-sum game, adding or subtracting freedom to either God or man as is necessary to posit an equilibrium. 


E.g: in order to avoid the deterministic implications of this dual viewpoint, we recant God's total control/knowledge of the event because I am indeed free in a voluntaristic sense (as in Open Theism) or I am in possession of some type of libertarian freedom and God is totally predetermining and the two just co-exist in paradox and we shouldnt bother to explain it (paradoxical indeterminism, Occasionalism), or I am free even though the event will happen because God foreknew all possible scenarios and knew exactly in which scenario I would freely choose to make a sandwich tomorrow (i.e. in Molinism or Middle-Knowledge propounded by modern theologians like William Craig) or the event is determined but I am still free because, lets be honest, I love sandwiches and I would make one anyway (generic Compatibalism). 


All of these various solutions presuppose the dual viewpoint theory. They all view man mediated via a perspective of God's eternal relation to time and hence necessarily have a view to how man is related to a future already actualized or going to be actualized whose not-yet-actualized-but-will-be-actualized-in-an-already-known-way reveal man to be involved in an already set grid of circumstances in which one has to locate freedom or unfreedom within the subject drowning in an ocean of the already actualized, and so their own particularity and viewpoint are suspended for the sake of the universal. Yet here we must be aware that the very nature of the terms trying to be saved (such as freedom, or God's omnipotence,...) and their (potentially conflicting) relationship are being framed by the very grammar of the dual viewpoint theory.  For example, it appears that if the event X is sure to occur tomorrow, then as I am not free to choose otherwise, I am unfree and predestination wins the day.  Yet this definition of "freedom," as opposed to determinism is in a sense an abstraction that nowhere touches the ontological or phenomenological qualities of how we actually live our lives and are related to the world.  The unknown of tomorrow is not merely an epistemological quality of my limited knowledge, it seeps into my bones, is part of my very being.  Im not thereby arguing that tomorrow has not been set already, merely that it is a non-sequitor because my ontological and epistemological relationship to a set or non-set tomorrow is identical: that is, open, contingent, from my point of view.


"Contingency" and "necessity" are themselves relative to the thought of some greater whole which we can only implicitly and vaguely understand from our own viewpoint. That an event was "necessary" can only be viewed when an event is complete. This means that necessity and contingency cannot be, strictly speaking, opposed to one another, because they have different aspectival reference points: contingency operates by speaking of possibilities that have not yet occured, while necessity speaks of things that have occured (even if they "have" only occured in the "future"). If the temporal passage of history, and the temporal relationships in which things stand, actually constitute their being, then the width of the temporal process cannot collapse into single "essential" points of reference to describe an object. I 'am' myself only in reference to the totality of history in which I stand, because any "portion" of my temporal life refers to other portions, and ultimately to the entirety of history in which I am embedded. This means that when I say "what I am" at any given point along that line, I am to a large extent anticipating the total outcome of myself in history. If, also, to speak of "necessity" or "contingency" in reference to an object, or an event, or a person, is in some sense to describe the "essence" of the thing, event, or person, this essence can only be described anticipating the finality and totality of a thing, unless the finality and totality of the thing is actually present (meaning the end of history as we know it). But if this is so, then to describe something as "necessary," in reference to its "whatness," can only take place definitively in retrospect of the totality.


But this means that necessity is necessity only when the event/object/person has already occured and now could not occur otherwise because it is fixed in the past. Contingency on the other hand describes an event in its occurance-as-process. Contingency must always "turn-into" necessity because of the "present" always giving way to the fixity of the past. But in its "immediatness" the totality has not yet occured to an object/event/person, and so events that happen are not "necessary," in the sense of a fixity. Fixity only happens retrospectively, if we are to assume that God's creation is not primarly a "Cosmos" that only then "has" (accidentally!) a history, but is itself historical and eschatological. This is why the duality of reference, or change of reference, in the traditional formulations of the questions obfuscate the issue (in my opinion): when we view things from God's vantage point everything "has happened" or "is happening" to speak crudely, and hence everything to us mediated via this eternal (and singular!) viewpoint appears to unfold with the utmost necessity. I am destined to eat the sandwich tomorrow, by this measure, because quite frankly from this vantage point it has already happened.


This is not merely an epistemological principle either. I would argue that it is inherently an ontological reality. As finite beings, to speak somewhat crudely, we are what happens to us. We absorb, inflect, and invent based upon our finite appropriation of reality. The future, from our ontological "vantage point" of the present, has not yet happened. In this sense, even if from God's point of view the future might be "fixed,"-- to us it is ontologically open, because relative to the finite ontology of our being, it has not yet occurred. Moreover God does not encounter or deal with us simply via the totality, but in relation to the context of our existence, the Incarnation demonstrates that God creates space of encounter that "accommodates" to the presence of the other. The question of choice and freedom (to be sure, not the same thing) must not bypass this particularity in attempting to answer "how is man free/unfree." The relativity of our present ontological situation in regards to the not-yet of the future indicates a relative freedom viz a viz future events because their ontological fixity has not occured, and they "influence" us in only a proleptic or provisional way, indicating a vast horizon of the possible. From this viewpoint the "fixity" or determination of choice in the individual or community takes a different tone, so to speak (or at least, that was the intention).


So what then is a possible alternative? My proposal (as tentative as it is) proposes that one cannot forsake the situatedness and particularity of the individual, even in a theoretical way, to discuss predestination and free will. We might say that this is (despite whatever difficulties arise in attempting a general ontology from the particularity of Christ) an extended interpretation of Barth's view of Christ as the elected and Pannenberg's ontology of the whole. God does not relate to us as some "universal," or sublime, though the Holy Spirit pervades the world. Rather we relate to God via the Mediator, the High-Priest, that is Christ (and all the various "pre-appearances" e.g. Word, Wisdom, "The Name," the Angel of the Lord, etc...), and hence God relates to us not in a sublime roar of pure universal light, but descends to the particular, to relate to us as particular and situated human beings. Pannenberg writes: "God does not encounter the apostate creature with power and holiness. He is present with it at its own place and under the conditions of its own existence…This takes place through the eternal Son, who in consequence of his self-distinction from the Father takes the place of the creature and becomes man so as to overcome the assertion of the creature’s independence in the position of the creature itself, i.e. without violating its independence. We are thus to view the incarnation of the Son as the supreme expression of the omnipotence of God…" (Systematic Theology vol.1 p.421). That is to say, though it wont be developed in this post, God's relation to the world is not as an undifferentiated monad or principle, but is a Trinitarian relation which respects the particularity and historical nature of man. What then of the "necessity," or "contingency" of an event? How might this look different if we stayed at the level of the particular, at our viewpoint, as it were, as we relate to God via Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit?


Obviously more needs to be said on this but I want to cut this off for later posts.  For example I think we need to also wonder at the terms "cause" and "effect," and what they possibly mean when applied to God.  But first a possible rejoinder to my position which I think does cause some difficulties: what about cases where a victim is drugged and forced to do something that they nonetheless think they are doing of their free will?  Isnt this analogous to the predestination vs free will problem?  And isn't it the case that we would argue the drugged victim is in fact unfree despite whatever their subjective disposition?    I have several possible answers, but I will need to think about them some more.  They have to do again, with how terms like "cause" are being used here.  Or whether or not this scenario is actually an apt analogy, since it plainly is dealing with a manipulation of our normal sense of things via drugs.  But enough of that for now.