Philosophical Theology

The quote is from Scott Christensen. 

“Proponents of libertarian free will believe that for any choice to be truly free, it must not be constrained by any outside causal forces. God and other sources can influence our choices, but they cannot decisively determine the outcome of our choices. Furthermore, libertarian free will affirms that we have the power of contrary choice. Suppose you drive your car to a T-intersection and choose to turn right. However, if the clock could be rolled back and the conditions were the same, you could have equally chosen to turn left.”

When Reformed theologians defend God’s sovereignty, a single wrong turn in language can accidentally blur the nuances of Christian Compatibilism.

Scott Christensen uses a T-intersection analogy to address libertarian free will. But by looking under the hood of his argument, it’s not clear how we might avoid a misunderstanding in modal logic, unwittingly turning everyday human choices into abstract, absolute necessities.

In his critique of libertarian free will, Christensen imagines a free moral agent driving to a T-intersection and choosing to turn right. By comparison, he suggests that if the clock were rolled back to the exact same conditions, a compatibilist framework means the driver could not have chosen otherwise. While his goal is to dismantle libertarianism, his specific framing of the issue raises a modal question for Reformed theology. Are human choices necessary truths rather than contingent ones?

If we assert that an agent strictly could not have done otherwise based solely on the conditions prior to their actual intention or inclination, we risk blurring the vital distinction between contingency and necessity. In formal modal logic, if an event is absolutely impossible to happen otherwise under a given state of affairs, it resembles a necessary proposition, akin to saying a triangle must have three sides.

However, standard Reformed orthodoxy has long maintained that creaturely choices are contingent truths. The alternative choice (turning left) must retain its status as a metaphysical possibility, which means there exists a possible world where the agent turns left under those conditions – even if that choice is not actualized in our actual world.

Calvinists must be careful not to grant too much causal weight to the prior conditions themselves, treating them as if they possess an intrinsic, mechanistic power that dictates human volition. If the physical or historical conditions themselves carry the raw causal power to guarantee the outcome, the position no longer retains the contingency of Christian compatibilism. Furthermore, God’s decree would be forced to navigate counterfactuals that ought to be understood as products of the decree itself.

To keep Calvinism logically sound, we must deploy the classical distinction between the necessity of the consequence and the necessity of the consequent. It is necessarily true that if God decrees a certain turn, that turn will certainly happen (necessity of the consequence). But this does not mean the turn itself is an absolute necessity under identical conditions (necessity of the consequent).

From a Calvinistic perspective, it is helpful to distinguish actual “ability” (which is bound to the actual world and God’s sovereign, determinative decree of causal relationships) from metaphysical “possibility” (which looks at what is conceptually non-contradictory across possible worlds). We don’t want to interpret the T-intersection illustration of a free, contingent human action as an abstract logical necessity. To protect human responsibility while maintaining that free choices are an object of God’s free knowledge and not his natural knowledge, Reformed thinkers must affirm that while an agent lacks the actual ability to thwart God’s decree, free choices are nonetheless contingently true and, therefore, in a real sense could possibly be otherwise under identical conditions.