Two respondents to Lynne Rudder Baker's 2003 article "Why Christians Should not be Libertarians: An Augustinian Challenge" (Faith and Philosophy, 20:4 (2003): 460-478), which article is not online, give some cogent responses criticising her compatibilist account of free will. (Both links below are pdf files.)
John M. Depoe's Why Christians Should not be Compatibilists: A Response to Baker
Kevin Timpe's Why Christians Might be Libertarians: A Reply to Lynne Rudder Baker
Posted by Clifton at April 7, 2005 12:11 PM | TrackBackKevin Tempe is a smart guy, probably smarter than me. He was at SLU just as I arrived. While I obviously do not agree with everything I think Baker is mistaken.
The problem that I see is that free will is being asked to do too much work. It seems that there are plausible candidates, human and divine who have free will in the libertarian sense but yet are morally impeccable. If these cases are plausible, then free will can't be doing all of the explanatory work with respect to evil.
Moreover, if we tie the possibility of evil to free will, we either have to eliminate freedom or severly attenuate it at some juncture to secure the impossibility of evil or we face a possible cycle of falls and redemptions. Hence we are right back at Origen's dialectic.
The way out is not to tie the possibility of evil to free will per se, but to a specific mode of free will, namely free will as a means to attain virtue. Once virtue is attained and we are fixed freely in the Good, the ladder of the possibility of evil can be kicked away. Otherwise we run the risk of a kind of Manicheanism where the possibility of evil is necessarily tied to creaturehood in some way.
This move requires that we pay more attention to virtue theory with respect to ethics as a guide to philosophical theology. What is more it requires that we rethink Hell as not so much retributive but as consequential.
Posted by: Perry Robinson at April 7, 2005 07:42 PM