Friday, January 21, 2011

Compatibilism and classical theism

Standard definitions of compatibilism say something like:
  1. Compatibilism holds if and only if there is a world where there is determinism and at least one exercise of free will.
Standard definitions of determinism say something like:
  1. Determinism holds at w if and only if for any time t in the history of w, and any world w* such that (a) the laws of w hold at w* and (b) w* exactly matches w at t, the worlds w and w* exactly match in the future of t.
If we define compatibilism and determinism as above, then classical theism entails compatibilism. According to classical theism, God is outside time, free and omnipotent. God could, then, create a world at which determinism holds, since determinism only concerns the beings that are in time, and hence the determinism would not apply to him. (A tricky issue is: Couldn't God always produce miracles, thereby making the right hand side of (2) be unsatisfied? Well, we could imagine that in the deterministic world, at every time, there is heard a divine promise to do no miracles.) And if he did this, then that would be a world where there is determinism and at least one exercise of free will—namely, God's exercise of free will.
I think this only shows that the standard definitions of (in)compatibilism are wrong. Instead of saying that determinism is incompatible with freedom, they should say that determinism is incompatible with beings like us having freedom.

1 comment:

  1. Isn't the world's being deterministic sort of a red herring anyway? Suppose the entire world is deterministic, except that a single molecule in the Andromeda galaxy behaved very slightly indeterministically for 13 seconds in the year 1800. Surely that wouldn't affect whether we have the sort of freedom compatibilists want us to have? Or am I just missing something?

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