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This Element explores the relevance of non-human animals to theology. It suggests that while Christian theology has so far been a thoroughly anthropocentric discipline, there are good reasons for treating animals as subjects worthy of theological reflection in their own right. The Element considers animals in the context of Christian ethics, investigates whether the violence and suffering found in evolutionary processes can be reconciled with a good God, and surveys some of the ways key theological doctrines may need to be altered in the light of what contemporary science teaches about human animals and non-humans.
Is it consistent to maintain that human free will is incompatible with determinism in the natural world while also maintaining that it is compatible with divine universal causation? On the face of it, divine universal causation looks like a form of determinism. And the intuitions that lead to incompatibilism about free will and natural determinism also lead to incompatibilism about free will and divine determinism. W. Matthews Grant resists this conclusion. Grant contends that we can understand all of God’s activity as an exercise of divine “libertarian” free will and can construe God’s actions as nothing over and above the (created) effects brought about. I argue that Grant’s attempted reconciliation of human free will and universal divine causation fails, and on two counts. First, Grant’s account of the interaction of divine and created agency is occasionalist; second, even if we assume Grant’s account successfully avoids the charge of occasionalism, it fails to reconcile divine agency with created free agency. The latter is illustrated by exploring the nature of the determination relation required by incompatibilist, agent-causal accounts of free will.
This Element considers the relationship between the traditional view of God as all-powerful, all-knowing and wholly good on the one hand, and the idea of human free will on the other. It focuses on the potential threats to human free will arising from two divine attributes: God's exhaustive foreknowledge and God's providential control of creation.
Sennett (1999) and Pawl and Timpe (2009; 2013) attempt to show how we can praise heavenly agents for things they inevitably do in heaven by appealing to the notion of derivative freedom. Matheson (2017) has criticized this use of derivative freedom. In this article I show why Matheson's argument is inconclusive but also how the basic point may be strengthened to undermine the use Sennett and Pawl and Timpe make of derivative freedom. I then show why Matheson is mistaken to claim that the value of free choice depends on an agent retaining the ability to change their mind; in so doing I demonstrate that some choices which result in fixed outcomes – a feature of the choices leading to impeccability – can indeed be valuable even if they cannot be undone.
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